ICFAI Business School (IBS) Hyderabad has won the Dark Side Case Competition award, organised by the Critical Management Studies division of Academy of Management (AOM), for the third time. The 78th conference was held in Chicago from August 10-14. IBS won the award for its case ‘Ashley Madison hacking and the ethics of hacktivism’ written by Debapratim Purkayastha, Syeda Maseeha Qumer and Koti Vinod Babu.
Another case, ‘United Airlines Inc: the manhandling incident’, written by Vijaya Narapareddy (University of Denver), Qumer and Purkayastha, was also a finalist in the competition. Other finalists were from institutions such as University of Bath, Victoria University of Wellington, and University of Glasgow.
Abstract of the winning case
The case deals with the ethical issues involved in hacking of Ashley Madison, a website promoting infidelity. The website was hacked by a group that called itself ‘The Impact Team’ in July 2015. Impact stole the customer information profiles along with other personal and sensitive information. Later, it published the hacked data online as Ashley Madison did not fulfil their demand of shutting down the website. Impact had claimed two motivations for the hack: first, they criticised Ashley Madison’s main mission of arranging affairs between married individuals. Second, they condemned Ashley Madison’s business practices, in specific, its condition that users pay $19 for the privilege of deleting all their data from the site.