Ashley Madison Offers £8.5m To Data Breach Victims

The parent company of adult dating site Ashley Madison has offered to pay an $11.2 million (£8.5m) settlement to users affected by the mass data breach which exposed 36 million accounts.

The site is known for encouraging infidelity and targeting people seeking affairs, so the public exposure of confidential users data obviously caused quite a stir when it was revealed by hackers in July 2015.

Many users have since sued the company for providing inadequate levels of data security and Ruby Life has been attempting to strike a deal with those involved.

Cash offer

On Friday it claimed that an agreement to settle multiple class action lawsuits had been reached and that the £8.5m fund would be available to those who “submit valid claims for alleged losses resulting from the data breach”.

In a statement, Ruby Life said: “While ruby denies any wrongdoing, the parties have agreed to the proposed settlement in order to avoid the uncertainty, expense, and inconvenience associated with continued litigation, and believe that the proposed settlement agreement is in the best interest of ruby and its customers.”

In December of last year Ruby was ordered to pay US regulators $1.6 million (£1.3m) for lacking basic security practices and Ashley Madison’s founder and CEO Noel Biderman stepped down in the immediate wake of the cyber attack.

Users also reported receiving blackmail letters after the stolen data had been made public by the hackers, as scammers reacted quickly to the extremely high-profile news.

Ashley Madison is not the only dating website to have been targeted by hackers over the last couple of years. For example, in 2016 BeautifulPeople.com suffered a data breach where the personal details of 1.1 million users were leaked online.

And in the same year Adult FriendFinder admitted that it had been hacked for a second time, putting the personal data of 73 million users at risk.

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