Inside the wild, eternal story of the Ashley Madison hacking scandal

On July 13, 2015, Evan Buck He walked through the door of his office in Toronto and immediately felt something was wrong.

People are usually walking around drinking coffee and getting ready to face the next Monday. Instead, he remembers, there was “a strange, exhausting, uncomfortable silence.”

When he turned on his computer, he understood.

Nine years ago, Buck was a sales VP at Ashley Madison, a dating site that catered to married people looking to hook up over the weekend.

“The promise of security, anonymity, assurance and safety was just something we said,” Buck recalls in the recent Netflix docuseries Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Scandal. “It wasn’t something we did.”

Amit JethaniThe site’s former product manager agreed.

“Each department had to get creative because there was no real playbook for running a service like this,” he said in the series. Although security was frequently discussed, support for the regime continued to fall by the wayside. He added that everyone knew that the hack “could have been disastrous.” “The hope was that wouldn’t happen.”