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Toronto police are reporting that clients of the recently hacked website AshleyMadison.com are being blackmailed, with authorities calling upon those who know the hackers – who dub themselves the Impact Team – to come forward with any information in regards to their identities.
The police have revealed that the data leaked onto the dark web has been used for extortion attempts, in which those who have obtained the data have contacted registered clients of the site and asked for money in exchange for their secrecy. Given that the site is used by those looking to conduct extra-marital affairs, it’s likely that these extortion attempts have worked. Sheelah Kolhatkar, a writer for Bloomberg Business, revealed that she has received messages from an anonymous individual who discovered her personal information in the data leak, and attempted to blackmail her out of money. Kolhatkar states that her registering to the site was a result of a feature she penned for Bloomberg, though that was of no consequence to the anonymous harasser.
Of her exchange with the unnamed individual, Kolhatkar wrote: “So far, in my case, the harassment has been in the form of anonymous text messages that continued all day from someone who refused to identify himself or herself and who took a moralistic, scolding tone. “What I can’t understand is how an intelligent person like yourself got caught in this,” the person wrote. “What were you thinking?””
Yesterday it was revealed that there have been two suicides in relation to the Ashley Madison hack, which has seen 32 million user profiles taken from the site distributed online, and that the site’s owners Avid Life Media are offering up a $500,000 reward to those who give information that leads to the arrest of those involved. However, there have been reports that rather than this being the work of a team of hackers, the data was instead “stolen by a woman operating on her own who worked for Avid Life Media.”
This implication was made by computer programmer John McAfee, who claimed in an article for the IB Times that the crime must have been an inside job as “it was clear that the perpetrator had intimate knowledge of the technology stack of the company,” adding: “For example, the data contains actual MySQL database dumps. This is not just someone copying a table and making into a .csv file. Hackers rarely have full knowledge of the technology stack of a target.”
However, McAfee then went on to sully his reasonable speculation by making the assumption that the individual who stole the files must have been female as “there were a number of telling signs in the manifestos. The most telling was a statement calling men “scumbags” (for those readers that don’t speak American/Canadian English, this is a word that only a woman would ever use to describe men).” But regardless of that particularly sexist assumption, McAfee is a well-known security expert that would undoubtedly have a good grasp on how the data was stolen, which adds another twist to this increasingly controversial tale.
With the Ashley Madison hack leading to a number of further crimes being perpetrated, those implicated in the attack should expect to receive a severe punishment from authorities if they are found. With a $500,000 bounty resting on their heads, it should be expected that someone will reveal their identities sooner rather than later.
