Social media went wild about the two Ashley Madison hacks. But wild, in this case, is not the same as angry.
Overnight on August 20, Ashley Madison’s hackers, who call themselves the Impact team, dumped a second load of files (where files is a euphemism for the personal details, including the names, home addresses, credit card details and sexual preferences, of Ashley Madison users). It’s double the size of the first dump – 20GB. The hackers have also got cocky. They left a message, “Hey Noel, you can admit it’s real now,” on the same site as the first data breach. This was a response to Ashley Madison’s public response to the hackers that the hacked data might not be authentic. The second dump also contains emails sent by Ashley Madison’s founder.
The hackers were protesting the site’s optional pay to delete button that offers to wipe any user’s profile clean for US$19. The hackers say the site stores users’ data even if they pay to have it removed.
You can probably guess that a vastly larger chunk of the world’s adult population now know what Ashley Madison is.
The online dating agency is running its TV ad in Australia at the moment, nonetheless.
So, has the adage, ‘all publicity is good publicity,” been disproved?
Between July 20 and August 19, digital chatter about Ashley Madison increased 666 % compared to the period, June 19 to July 19. [Amobee Brand Intelligence]. There were sympathetic tweets, humorous tweets and outraged tweets.
1o% of the amped up online talk was positive. That is, in fact, pretty much the same proportion of negative talk as the month before (9%). (There was just a lot more of it by number.)
Josh Duggar, the reality TV star of 19 Kids and Counting, whose squeaky clean image has committed suicide, is also giving “all publicity” a test run.
Daily traffic to the site dropped by half immediately after the hack, then recovered somewhat [SimilarWeb]. Between the day after the first and the day before the second dumps, AshleyMadison had an average 2 million visitors daily, down from 2.7 million per day in the previous three months.
Australian radio listeners took their anger out on Nova 96.9’s top rating breakfast hosts, Fitzy and Wippa. The duo offered to check anyone’s email address against the data released by hackers in the first dump, for any female listener who suspected her partner was cheating. And then did. They told one woman that her husband was registered. That triggered a lot of outrage, but not at Ashley Madison:
