Top Suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison Hack Committed Suicide in 2014 – Krebs on Security

When the marital infidelity web site AshleyMadison.com realized in July 2015 that hackers have been threatening to publish information stolen from 37 million customers, the corporate’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was fast to level the finger at an unnamed former contractor. However as a brand new documentary collection on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was only one downside with that concept: Their high suspect had killed himself greater than a 12 months earlier than the hackers started publishing stolen consumer information.

The brand new documentary, The Ashley Madison Affair, begins airing right this moment on Hulu in the USA and on Disney+ in the UK. The collection options interviews with safety specialists and journalists, Ashley Madison executives, victims of the breach and jilted spouses.

The collection additionally touches on surprising new particulars unearthed by KrebsOnSecurity and Jeremy Bullock, a knowledge scientist who labored with the present’s producers on the Warner Bros. manufacturing firm Wall to Wall Media. Bullock had spent many hours poring over the a whole lot of 1000’s of emails that the Ashley Madison hackers stole from Biderman and printed on-line in 2015.

Wall to Wall reached out in July 2022 about collaborating with Bullock after KrebsOnSecurity printed A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach. That piece explored how Biderman — who’s Jewish — had turn into the goal of concerted harassment campaigns by anti-Semitic and far-right teams on-line within the months main as much as the hack.

Whoever hacked Ashley Madison had entry to all worker emails, however they solely launched Biderman’s messages — three years price. Apropos of my retrospective report, Bullock discovered that an awesome many messages in Biderman’s inbox have been belligerent and anti-Semitic screeds from a former Ashley Madison worker named William Brewster Harrison.

William Harrison’s employment contract with Ashley Madison father or mother Avid Life Media.

The messages present that Harrison was employed in March 2010 to assist promote Ashley Madison on-line, however the messages additionally reveal Harrison was closely concerned in serving to to create and domesticate phony feminine accounts on the service.

There may be proof to counsel that in 2010 Harrison was directed to harass the proprietor of Ashleymadisonsucks.com into closing the positioning or promoting the area to Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison’s father or mother firm — Toronto-based Avid Life Media — filed a trademark infringement criticism in 2010 that succeeded in revealing a person named Dennis Bradshaw because the proprietor. However after being knowledgeable that Bradshaw was not topic to Canadian trademark legal guidelines, Avid Life provided to purchase AshleyMadisonSucks.com for $10,000.

When Bradshaw refused to promote the area, he and his then-girlfriend have been topic to an unrelenting marketing campaign of on-line harassment and blackmail. It now seems these assaults have been perpetrated by Harrison, who despatched emails from completely different accounts on the free electronic mail service Vistomail pretending to be Bradshaw, his then-girlfriend and their mates.

[As the documentary points out, the domain AshleyMadisonSucks.com was eventually transferred to Ashley Madison, which then shrewdly used it for advertising and to help debunk theories about why its service was supposedly untrustworthy].

Harrison even went after Bradshaw’s lawyer and spouse, itemizing them each on a web site he created known as Contact-a-CEO[.]com, which Harrison used to besmirch the title of main corporations — together with a number of previous employers — all entities he believed had slighted him or his household not directly. The positioning additionally claimed to incorporate the names, addresses and cellphone numbers of high CEOs.

A cached copy of Harrison’s web site, contact-the-ceo.com.

An exhaustive evaluation of domains registered to the varied Vistomail pseudonyms utilized by Harrison reveals he additionally ran Bash-a-Enterprise[.]com, which Harrison devoted to “all these sorry ass company executives on the market profiting out of your laborious work, organs, lives, concepts, intelligence, and wallets.” Copies of the positioning at archive.org present it was the work of somebody calling themselves “The Chaos Creator.”

Will Harrison was terminated as an Ashley Madison worker in November 2011, and by early 2012 he’d turned his appreciable harassment expertise squarely in opposition to the corporate. Ashley Madison’s long-suspected military of faux feminine accounts got here to the fore in August 2012 after the previous intercourse employee turned activist and blogger Maggie McNeill printed screenshots apparently taken from Ashley Madison’s inside techniques suggesting that a big share of the feminine accounts on the service have been computer-operated bots.

Ashley Madison’s executives understood that solely a handful of workers on the time would have had entry to the techniques wanted to provide the screenshots McNeill printed on-line. In a single alternate on Aug. 16, 2012, Ashley Madison’s director of IT was requested to provide an inventory of all firm workers with omnipotent administrator entry.

“Who or what’s asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman requested, after being despatched an inventory of 9 electronic mail addresses.

“It seems to be the e-mail handle Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.

“And his entry was by no means shut off till right this moment?,” requested the corporate’s basic counsel Mike Dacks.

A Biderman electronic mail from 2012.

What prompted the information scientist Bullock to succeed in out have been gobs of anti-Semitic diatribes from Harrison, who had taken to labeling Biderman and others “grasping Jew bastards.”

“So good luck, I’m certain we’ll discuss once more quickly, however for now, Ive acquired higher issues within the oven,” Harrison wrote to Biderman after his employment contract with Ashley Madison was terminated. “Simply bear in mind I outsmarted you final time and I’ll outsmart and out maneuver you this time too, by retaining myself far far-off from the motion and simply having fun with the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”

A 2012 electronic mail from William Harrison to former Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.

Harrison signed his threatening missive with the salutation, “We’re legion,” suggesting that no matter comeuppance he had in retailer for Ashley Madison would come from a wide range of instructions and nameless hackers.

The leaked Biderman emails present that Harrison made good on his threats, and that within the months that adopted Harrison started focusing on Biderman and different Ashley Madison executives with menacing nameless emails and spoofed cellphone calls laced with profanity and anti-Semitic language.

However on Mar. 5, 2014, Harrison dedicated suicide by taking pictures himself within the head with a handgun. This truth was apparently unknown to Biderman and different Ashley Madison executives greater than a 12 months later when their July 2015 hack was first revealed.

Does Harrison’s premature suicide rule him out as a suspect within the 2015 hack? Who’s The Chaos Creator, and what else transpired between Harrison and Ashley Madison previous to his loss of life? We’ll discover these questions in Half II of this story, to be printed early subsequent week.