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On July 13, 2015, Evan Back walked through the door of his Toronto office and immediately sensed something was wrong.
Normally people would be milling around, drinking coffee, getting ready to tackle the Monday ahead. Instead, he remembered, there “was a strange, weary, uncomfortable silence.”
When he switched on his computer, he understood.
Nine years ago, Back was VP of sales at Ashley Madison, and the dating site that catered to married people looking to have affairs had been hacked over the weekend.
“The promise of security and anonymity and guarantee and safety was just something we said,” Back recalled in the recent Netflix docuseries Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal. “It wasn’t something we did.”
Amit Jethani, former director of product for the site, concurred.
“Every department had to get creative because there was no real playbook for running a service like this one,” he said in the series. And though security was frequently discussed, shoring up the system kept falling by the wayside. Everyone knew a hack “would have been catastrophic,” he added. “The hope was that it wouldn’t happen.”
But as anyone who couldn’t resist the siren song of schadenfreude in the summer of 2015 remembers, it happened. And the aftermath was nuts.
Obviously there was egg on the face of the company with the motto “Life is short. Have an affair.”
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Yet the scandal is far more remembered for the bold-faced names who were subsequently identified as Ashley Madison account holders (or alleged account holders, as some who were publicly named denied ever signing up) and the massive amount of judgment that ensued.
The Netflix series comes less than a year after the ABC News/Hulu documentary The Ashley Madison Affair and serves as a reminder of two things: Some of the sleaziest moments in our culture benefit from a little hindsight. And there’s always another layer to be peeled.
Here’s what happened when Ashley Madison got hacked:
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