Ashley Madison founder Noel Biderman poses with a poster during an interview at a hotel in Hong Kong August 28, 2013. 
 
 A photo illustration shows the Ashley Madison website displayed on a smartphone in Toronto in this August 20, 2015 file photo. 
 
 TORONTO Hundreds of thousands of people signed up for infidelity website Ashley Madison in the last week, parent company Avid Life Media said on Monday, even after hackers leaked data about millions of its clients. 
 
 The company also struck back at reports that the site had few genuine female users, saying internal data released by hackers had been incorrectly analyzed. 
 
 "Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," the company said in a statement. "Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing." 
 
 On Aug. 18, hackers who claimed to be unhappy with Avid Life's business practices released Ashley Madison customer data. A second data dump contained thousands of emails and other company documents. Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the data, emails or documents. 
 
 Last week, tech blog Gizmodo published a widely cited analysis of the customer data, concluding that very few female members had ever checked the site for messages. 
 
 Avid Life said on Monday that an unnamed reporter had wrongly concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on assumptions about the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data. 
 
 "Last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform," Avid Life said, adding that 87,596 women had also signed up for Ashley Madison last week. 
 
 Gizmodo published another post on Monday, saying it had arrived at a low number of active female users "based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence." 
 
 On Friday, Avid Life said Chief Executive Officer Noel Biderman had left the company by mutual agreement. 
 
 For at least three years before the publication of details about its members, Avid Life had been struggling to sell itself or raise funds, according to internal documents and emails that hackers also released. 
 
 (Reporting by Allison Martell; editing by Jeffrey Hodgson and Bill Rigby) ||||| Executives at Ashley Madison may have lost their founder and CEO after suffering a breach that leaked highly personal details for more than 30 million users, but they want to make one thing clear: business fundamentals are strong, and the service for people seeking discreet encounters won't go gentle into that good night. 
 
 "Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," the remaining executives wrote in a statement issued early Monday morning. "The company continues its day-to-day operations even as it deals with the theft of its private data by criminal hackers. Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing." The statement went on to say that the company acquired "hundreds of thousands of new users"—including 87,596 women—although Ars has no way of confirming any of the numbers provided. 
 
 Monday's statement also challenged media reports claiming that an infinitesimal percentage of Ashley Madison users were real women and that the rest were either men or bogus female accounts manufactured by Ashley Madison employees in an attempt to lure men. Women sent in excess of 2.8 million messages on the Ashley Madison platform last week alone, company executives said, even as the company provided no details on how many messages were sent from male accounts and made no assurances that the female messages weren't generated by automated scripts. 
 
 Further Reading Ashley Madison hack is not only real, it’s worse than we thought Details like those don't seem to matter. Ashley Madison executives are in survival mode. According to the Reuters news service, they were already searching for a buyer in the months leading up to the attack. It's hard to imagine a site that guaranteed 30 million members 100-percent discretion surviving such a breathtaking public breach. But that's just how the executives see it. And since we're on the outside looking in, there's no way to dispute or confirm the claims. 
 
 Here's the statement in its entirety: ||||| That Gizmodo investigation of leaked data suggesting that most of the women on Ashley Madison's affair-seeking service were fake? Completely bogus... if you ask Ashley Madison. It claims that there are plenty of real live women on the site -- the ratio of paying men to active women (who get to use it for free) is reportedly 1.2 to 1, and women sent 2.8 million messages just in the past week. Gizmodo made "incorrect assumptions" about what some of the data fields meant, Ashley Madison says. Whether or not that's true, you'll want to keep the data in context. The service isn't outlining the ratio of real to fake women, so it's not clear whether real women are bountiful or needles in the proverbial haystack.
– Last week, Gizmodo claimed that an investigation showed most of the female user profiles on Ashley Madison were either fake or inactive—the same complaint hackers had about the site before leaking a massive amount of data—and now the cheating website is hitting back. "Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison's parent company, says in a statement picked up by Reuters. In fact, the company claims that not only have hundreds of thousands of people signed up for Ashley Madison accounts in the past week, but 87,596 of those people are women. Today's statement notes that an unnamed reporter—presumably referring to the Gizmodo writer—incorrectly calculated the number of active female users when looking at the leaked data, and that in truth, "last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform." Ars Technica notes that there's no way to confirm the number of new sign-ups, and as for those 2.8 million messages, "the company ... made no assurances that the female messages weren't generated by automated scripts." And Engadget notes that while Avid Life Media's statement also claims the ratio of men to active ladies on the site is 1.2 to 1, the company "isn't outlining the ratio of real to fake women, so it's not clear whether real women are bountiful or needles in the proverbial haystack." On another note, the leaked Ashley Madison data revealed that Avid Life Media had been "struggling to sell itself or raise funds" in the three years before the hack, Reuters reports.