Senior executives at Ashley Madison, the hacked website for married people who are seeking affairs, revelled in the security flaws of other dating businesses and may even have hacked at least one rival themselves.
Emails released as part of a massive leak of the site’s data, which Toronto police said on Monday may have led to two suicides so far, appeared to show that Noel Biderman, the chief executive, welcomed hacking attacks on competitors as an opportunity to promote Ashley Madison.
His company’s reputation was further damaged when it emerged that in November 2012 Raja Bhatia, the chief technology officer of the site until 2010, emailed Mr Biderman boasting about how easily he had been able to access and manipulate private user data on the new dating section of Nerve.com, an online sex and relationships magazine.
Last year, when Snapchat, the instant photo-sharing app, was compromised by anonymous hackers, Mr Biderman wrote in an email: “It would be huge if we could get me on as a commentator on this.”