An army of female bots worked on Ashley Madison dating site

Journalist and analyst Electronic Frontier Foundation Anneli Nyuvits (Annalee Newitz) continues to study the sources dating site Ashley Madison, which were publicly available in August 2015 ( an official post from hackers Impact Team, with reference to the torrent in darkvebe).

Last time, Annelie examined a database that included columns with the names “bc_email_last_time,” “bc_chat_last_time” and “email_reply_last_time” - with the date and time for each user. First, Anneli and other specialists decided that the tables contain information about the time of the last user activity on the site. At the same time, the recent time was indicated in the cells mainly for men, and very rarely for women.

Based on this, it was concludedthat the site has only 12,000 active female users and tens of millions of men. This turned out to be a mistake. The reality turned out to be much more interesting. As it turned out during the further analysis of the sources, the columns “bc_email_last_time,” “bc_chat_last_time” and “email_reply_last_time” correspond not to the date and time of the last activity of the user, but to the date and time when the chatbot last contacted him .

Here are the statistics on chatbot contacts, which were previously mistakenly considered statistics of active users for men and women. The first chart shows the number of recently sent letters. The second chart shows the number of recent chats.





As you can see, 11 million unhappy men entered into a chat with female bots.

In the end, here are the statistics on the number of chatbots in the database.



Most bots were provided with @ ashleymadison.com email addresses and registered with the same IP addresses.

Using the program, the grepjournalist found sections of code where Ashley Madison programmers mentioned chatbots in comments using terms like hosts and engagers.

Judging by the comments in the code, the developers made sure that female bots appeared in every geographic region where there are single users, and the bot’s ultimate goal after birth was to find a man.

The chatbot action algorithm tried to take into account different situations, including non-standard ones. For example, here is one of the comments on the chat blocking function:

// Stopped engaging gaymen

Chatbots did not have a special intellect. Another piece of code contains a complete list of phrases that were used for the first contact with a man. The phrase was randomly selected from the list. The repetitions in the list are probably explained by the desire to increase the frequency of certain phrases in communication.

'hi',
'hi',
'hi',
'hi (s)',
'hi there',
'how are you?',
'hey',
'Hey',
'hey there',
'hey there',
' Hey there ',
' u busy? ',
' You there? ',
' Any body home? ',
' Hi ',
' Hi ',
' Hi ',
' hows it going? ',
' Chat? ',
' How ru ? ',
' anybody home? lol ',
' hello ',
' hello ',
'Hello',
'hello?',
'Whats up?',
'So what brings you here?',
'Oh hello',
'free to chat ??',

if the answer is yes, the chatbot responded with a more meaningful message, for example:

" Hmmmm, when I was younger I used to sleep with my friend's boyfriends. I guess old habits die hard although I could never sleep with their husbands ".

or

"I'm sexy, discreet, and always up for kinky chat. Would also meet up in person if we get to know each other and think there might be a good connection. Does this sound intriguing?"

To communicate with the owners of paid accounts, a separate bot service "RunChatBotXmppGuarentee.service.php" worked.

In one of the letters between the executive director of the company and the chief operating officer, a schedule was found with the profit generated by the chatbots. It can be seen how, within a year after the bots were disabled in Canada in 2011-2012, the site’s revenues significantly decreased.



The management had ideas to hire real women instead of chatbots. Ashley Madison, one of the developers, has developed an employee reward system (meaning “FemaleValue”). The remuneration of a woman depends on the amount that the site the men she serves (“MaleProfit”) have transferred. True, they did not manage to introduce the system into production.

In another comment, the developer noted that with the new settings, "South African bots can only come in contact with their race."

Ashley Madison has been actively working to localize bots for different countries. For example, after a referendum in Crimea, local chatbots switched from Ukrainian to Russian.