Ashley Madison CEO Steps Down, Reporter Finds Clues To Hacker's Identity

Dave Knott writes: Following the recent hacks on the infidelity website Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman has stepped down as CEO of both AshleyMadison.com and its parent company. Avid Life Media Inc., the company that owns the site and many others, announced Biderman's move in a short press release on Friday: "Noel Biderman, in mutual agreement with the company, is stepping down as chief executive officer of Avid Life Media Inc. (ALM) and is no longer with the company. Until the appointment of a new CEO, the company will be led by the existing senior management team." Before the data hack, the company was planning an IPO in London that would have taken in as much as $200 million from investors. According to regulatory filings, the company had $115 million in revenue last year, more than four times the amount it obtained in 2009.

Meanwhile, in related news, Brian Krebs (the reporter who first uncovered the hack) says he has uncovered clues to the possible identity of the hacker. Krebs says he noticed the Twitter account operated by a known hacker recently posted a link to Ashley Madison's stolen proprietary source code before it was made public. Intrigued by the poster's apparent access, he examined the account's posting history and noticed a predilection for the music of Australian hard rock band AC/DC. This jibes with the behavior of the hacker(s), who had displayed threatening messages on the computers of Ashley Madison employees, accompanied by AC/DC song Thunderstruck. In a series of tweets, the owner of the account, one Thadeus Zu, appears to deny that he was behind the hack, and indeed makes several suggestions that the account itself isn't even run by one person, but is instead an amalgam of like-minded digital vigilantes. The NY Times also reports that people whose details were contained in the leak are beginning to face threats of blackmail.

Comments

That really narrows it down

[hawguy]

There must only be a handful of people that could match such a specific description: listens to AC/DC, uses twitter, and denies any culpability. AC/DC has only sold around 200 million albums, so that alone dramatically restricts the possible culprits. The intersection between AC/DC aficionados and Twittter's 300M active users must be minuscule, maybe only one or two possible people.

Re:That really narrows it down

[tomhath]

When you only include people who had access to the source code before it was publicly available, the pool becomes quite small.

Re:That really narrows it down

[meta-monkey]

Didn't a variant of stuxnet play Thunderstruck when it pwned the Iranian nuclear facilities? So, one does not have to be an AC/DC fan to think up taunting AM with Thunderstruck during the hack. Just giving a nod to stuff better hackers than you did before.

Re:That really narrows it down

[infolation]

I thought all hackers hacked to AC/DC's Thunderstruck? Are you saying hollywood is wrong?

Re:Ironic

[gstoddart]

Than all of them, probably.

The guy who ran a website for cheaters was always open about that fact.

I'm less convinced in the transparency or honesty of pretty much any political candidate.

He should be going to jail

[Anonymous Coward]

He ran a fraud:

Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

...

About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages.

...

... a member had last replied to a message from another person on Ashley Madison. 5.9 million men had done it, and only 9700 women had.

...

Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

...

Re:He should be going to jail

[HornWumpus]

Ladies night in you neck of the woods involves a bunch of men in dresses trying to fool someone?

You need to find some new bars to go to, unless that's what you're into of course.

Re:He should be going to jail

[vux984]

I imagine they had those bases covered with ToS language.

A judge may not side with them just due to ToS. And A.M. misrepresented the facts pretty grossly here, and failed to live up to its obligations (paid delete).

Canada is pretty pragmatic about contracts; and its pretty common to side with the "little guy" if the contract is deemed to be deliberately constructed to weasel out of what a reasonable person should think they were signing up for.

There's also the fact that once a female made a response in that sort of environment, you'd probably have a date and be able to take it off the site,

Even so... only 9700 accounts by women ever sent a single message. And we don't know how many of those 9700 sent only one and then vanished, or how many of them had been online in the last 3 years... the number of active women on the site could well have been in the middle HUNDREDS.

As you pointed out, the numbers of women actually participating were overwhelmingly dwarfed by number of males, just as they are on most dating sites

1) Were not talking overwhemlingly dwarfed. I consider 10 or 20 to 1 to be overwhelmingly dwared. We're talking thousands to 1, maybe even 10s of thousands to 1. You could spend your whole month sending female profiles messages without getting a response... not because the women weren't interested in you, but because you never actually sent it to an account a woman actually even used.

Given that AM is charging you to send messages to these women (over and above "membership")... they are literally taking money so you can send a message to a fake account that no woman has ever used. Men may have to accept that not every message they send will be responded too, or even read, but to accept (without clear disclosure) that they have *vanishingly small odds* the messages they are paying to send will even be delivered to an account a real person even uses is beyond the pale. That's fraud.

just as they are on most dating sites. Most of the money in those sites is getting males to stay interested enough to keep shelling out money.

All that suggests is that fraud is probably pervasive in the industry and perhaps we should regulate these sites to disclose membership numbers, and for those numbers to be independently audited.

So that consumers can make an informed buying decision.

It's like ladies night at the bars.

I can see pretty clearly whether or not there are any ladies at the bar. And its not terribly hard to tell if they are all hookers and hostesses paid by the bar itself to be there.

Re:He should be going to jail

[AthanasiusKircher]

He ran a fraud:

That seems possible, and perhaps even likely. But the Gizmodo story overlooks something.

From your link:

There are definitely other possible explanations for these data discrepancies. It could be that the women's data in these three fields just happened to get hopelessly corrupted, even though the men's data didn't. Or maybe most of those accounts weren't deliberately faked, but just represented real women who came to the site once, never to return.

There's an obvious missing alternative possible explanation here -- The hackers could have tampered with the data.

This hack is notable because of its specific target of embarrassing and destroying the reputation of the company. Erasing or tampering with very specific database fields that make it look like Ashley Madison was perpetrating a complete fraud... well, that's certainly a convenient way to provide the final knife blow to any credibility the site or its management might have had.

Don't get me wrong -- I have no doubt that the site likely fabricated thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of female profiles, perhaps as initial enticement to get the site going in the beginning (since female numbers obviously are going to be less, as on any dating site). But the Gizmodo analysis wants us to believe that the ratio of active male:female members was something like 1000:1 or greater. Men and women certainly are different, but it's a little hard to believe that they're THAT different.

I'd say it's at least POSSIBLE that this data has been altered or tampered with by hackers who clearly have a specific moral agenda. This kind of tampering -- if it happened -- would effectively further their agenda to discredit the company. But perhaps it also serves other purposes... certainly there's been speculation that this moral attack was motivated by a personal affront or something. Perhaps the hack was partly motivated by someone specifically angry about a situation involving men cheating. Erasing data from most of the female accounts makes the men look even more desperate and pathetic than before, while simultaneously making the women look more "innocent."

I don't much care either way. But the reality is that the only data being used to support these claims has passed through hackers who clearly have their own agendas. Thus, we should be suspicious about apparent trends in that data which also conveniently further the hackers' moral agenda.

Not saying my hypothesis here is true, or even that it's likely. But it shouldn't be completely ignored as a possibility.

CEOs stepping down

[Bovius]

Protip: The CEO stepping down after a public embarrassment has never been anything other than a publicity stunt to save face. It does not represent remorse or an intent to change policy. At most, it means "we want someone who will do continue to do the same things we've always done but, somehow, will magically make these revelations stop happening".

I would be shocked if Biderman wasn't receiving a nice golden parachute along with it. Or at least silver.

Re:CEOs stepping down

[MightyMartian]

I'm not sure what the point of any of this is. Between the hacks and the revelations that the site is little more than a few hookers, some staff trying to titillate members, and a whole fucking lot of men, I'd say AM is pretty much dead at this point.

When I'm tinfoil hat mode, I wonder if this hack was really about some competitor committing an act of commercial homicide. It sure would be one way to wipe out a dominant player in the "find you a fuck buddy" industry.

I'm not sure this is the right response

[damn_registrars]

Make no mistake, I don't like what Ashley Madison did. They've been exposed for running a scam web site designed to sucker men out of lots of money quickly. However, that doesn't justify the hack - which is almost certainly a criminal offense at this level. Sure, the hackers took down the CEO of Ashley Madison, but we don't know what will happen next. They might just relaunch with the same aims and different window dressing. Meanwhile we seem to be celebrating the actions of the hackers, in spite of the fact that they did break the law.

Just because they used illegal techniques to attack a morally reprehensible company doesn't mean their techniques are magically vindicated. Celebrating the hack is immoral as well.

Re:I'm not sure this is the right response

[godrik]

I do not think many people are celebrating these hackers. I have no personal stakes in the story but I follow it because I find it socially interesting. It shows that security of webservices is critical to the life of many people. Ashley Madison is one thing with measurable but small social impact. If facebook's database was made public, the uproar would be much bigger.

Overall, this story makes it more clear why I would rather not participate in so called social networks. And it also gives a good example to give my student when talking about SQL injection, stack overflows and user input validation in general.

Where do these people go?

[Okian Warrior]

I've often wondered what happens to people like this after the fact.

For example, recall Aaron Barr, the guy running HB Gary and who claimed he could "out" the Anonymous members by dubious correlation of social media accounts.

Or that guy Paul Christoforo who threw down with Penny Arcade founder Mike Krahulik (and got fired, banned from PAX, and his marketing company's client dropped them).

Do these people find jobs somewhere on this planet? Does Kevin Mitnick's security firm have a lot of customers?

The Ashley Madison guy - that's 'gotta be an awkward interview, you know.

"Why did you leave your previous place of employment?"

Re:Ironic

[vux984]

The guy who ran a website for cheaters was always open about that fact.

On the other hand he was less than honest about how many actual women were on the site. (Fewer than 15,000 vs millions of clearly fake profiles) and also less than honest about what a "paid delete" actually paid for.

So men paid money to join a site to cheat with women that didn't exist, were then charged extra to send messages to women's accounts that were fake, and then when they paid even more to delete their accounts, well that didn't happen either.

If that's your idea of honesty and transparency, I don't know what you think counts as "dishonest".

inside job

[david_bonn]

This whole thing screams "inside job".

A lot of the information that has been released, most notably employee emails and internal company documents, couldn't possibly have also been on the servers that held the databases for the AM site. So either (1) the hackers thoroughly penetrated the company and got *everything*, or (2) the people running AM were stupider than I believe possible (actually you would have to *work* to put all of your eggs in one basket that way), or (3) someone swiped backup tapes when they were on their way out the door.

The last theory is the simplest.

Most places I worked at did offsite backups. The backups were left at the front desk for the courier to pick up each day. If some backups went missing there probably wouldn't be a freakout -- they'd just figure someone had thrown them in the trash or picked them up by mistake. Even if they did freak out they would do so very privately.

Re:inside job

[eth1]

This whole thing screams "inside job".

A lot of the information that has been released, most notably employee emails and internal company documents, couldn't possibly have also been on the servers that held the databases for the AM site. So either (1) the hackers thoroughly penetrated the company and got *everything*, or (2) the people running AM were stupider than I believe possible (actually you would have to *work* to put all of your eggs in one basket that way), or (3) someone swiped backup tapes when they were on their way out the door.

Well, compromise a Domain Admin account, and you pretty much own all of the servers an all-Microsoft shop. Lazy Linux administration can lead to a similar fate (excepting Exchange email, perhaps). Given the sorry state of security I've seen pretty much everywhere, once you get a foot in the door, it's not hard to expand your reach.

Re:Ironic

[fightinfilipino]

look at my user name.

Trump went on air and intentionally mocked Asians by using a stereotyped pinyin/coolie accent. he went on air another time and labeled latino immigrants as criminals and worse things.

that is racist in my book. and if you don't see it, consider that you might actually be a racist, too. racism isn't just wearing white hoods and going around burning crosses. it's ALSO staying silent or even applauding utter garbage like that uttered by Trump.

the most disgusting part of it: Trump knows EXACTLY what he's doing. he's riling up the ultra-conservative base to build primary support. that is solid proof of what powers the modern GOP.