Whitney Wolfe
Whitney Wolfe Herd.
- Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd travels with a bodyguard and employs full-time security at the company's offices, according to an interview in The Times.
- This is after a cyber attack on Bumble last summer, when a neo-Nazi website published an article with photos and phone numbers of Bumble staff, encouraging people to harass them.
- The FBI stepped in to take down the website.
Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd now travels with a bodyguard and employs a full-time security team at the dating app following a neo-Nazi cyber attack last year, The Times reported.
In an interview with the newspaper, Wolfe Herd said that after neo-Nazis targeted Bumble's staff by posting their photos and phone numbers, the FBI stepped in.
"We're a feminist company so we came under attack," Wolfe Herd told the Times. "Faces and phone numbers were put on a neo-Nazi website that the FBI subsequently took down. The post was a call to action to bring down the feminists of Bumble."
The cyber attack took place two weeks before the white-supremacist Charlottesville rally in August 2017. Bumble addressed it in a press statement released shortly afterwards.
Wolfe Herd told The Times there's a lot of anger against feminist entities like Bumble. "Misogyny is a very dangerous thing and there are a lot of people that still believe in it," she said. "It's a very alive misogynistic moment in America right now."
The 28-year-old also said she suffers from anxiety. She continued: "I haven't gone through the testing, but I should. It's anxiety about everything. I worry about awful things happening to people I love. They say phones are a strong catalyst for making anxiety worse, so I have this interesting balance - how do I make sure I'm on top of everything, but also preserve my mental health?"
She would not be drawn on a potential sale of Bumble, which is majority owned by Badoo billionaire Andrey Andreev. There were reports last year that it was in talks to sell to Tinder owner Match, with a valuation of $1 billion.