How to Find Women on Ashley Madison
August 18, 2015 was a terrible day for mankind, and when I say mankind, I do mean men specifically. On this day, the group of hackers known as The Impact Team dumped stolen user data from Ashley Madison, a website specifically for people looking to have an extramarital affair, onto the Web. Suddenly, the millions of users who had quietly signed up to find love outside of their marriages were thrust into the spotlight, and the picture was not a pretty one. For families whose loved ones had signed up for Ashley Madison, it was an incredibly shameful fact to hear from the public news stations. For men who signed up to find “hot females in their area”, it was also incredibly shameful to find that there were almost no human females active on Ashley Madison. In fact, in the first dump, out of the 37 million profiles leaked, only 5.5 million were registered as Female. To make matters worse, of those 5.5 million Female accounts, only a fraction were active females; the rest consisted of inactive accounts and fake accounts created by Ashley Madison to lure in men. While many news sources simply reported the statistic as 5.5 million females, the staff at Gizmodo took a much closer look at the data.
How did the people of Gizmodo separate the different types of females registered on Ashley Madison? They did a great deal of grunt work, separating the data by various comparisons and observations. However, the overall concept of their approach is basic graph theory. Let us consider a graph with nodes representing the registered users of Ashley Madison and directed edges representing active communication between two users. Specifically, for the edge to exist, the first node must send the message to the second node, and the second node must view the message. From this graph, the different types of users become very clear. There are a large number of registered females that are not connected by any edges, incoming or outgoing. These represent the women that registered at one point but stopped using the site, leaving the accounts to float in cyberspace. Then, there are the nodes that have an incredible number of leaving edges but very few incoming edges. These represent Ashley’s Angels, a group of fake accounts created by Ashley Madison to attract male users. Specifically, these are accounts from which the supposed female has responded to messages without ever having viewed the messages in the inbox. (Ashley Madison allows users to send mass responses, which would explain the large number of outgoing arrows.) The lack of incoming arrows is explained by the fact that the managers of these accounts will not open their inboxes to view the messages. After all, if their job is just to entice men with a default message, what is the use in reading the messages of desperate men? Finally, there are the nodes that have approximately equal number of incoming messages and outgoing messages. These represent the very few active women, who must actually read the messages before responding to them.
While it would be nearly impossible to partition the network into these separate groups from simply looking at the data in spreadsheets, the connections between the nodes give us a very simple way of identifying the different types of users. Just like the graph of the karate club, shown in class, the graph of Ashley Madison data forms a very clear picture of the different subgroups that form. Considering the fact that Ashley Madison is a company built upon the dreams of men bored by monogamy, it is no surprise that it is in the best interests of Ashley Madison to deliver that fantasy by any means necessary. Building a bot to mimic the interactions between humans is significantly more cost-efficient than hiring real women to talk to the myriad of men. Although they claim to have a plethora of female users, the sad truth is that Ashley Madison hosts significantly more bots than humans. For all of the Cornell alums who have signed up for Ashley Madison, the odds of finding a woman through this method may be lower than originally reported.
For Reference:
Gizmodo Article: http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database-1725558944
General Facts About the Scandal: http://www.eonline.com/news/690845/this-ashley-madison-madness-shows-no-signs-of-slowing-down-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-hacking-scandal
Update: http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924