When the marital infidelity web site AshleyMadison.com realized in July 2015 that hackers have been threatening to publish knowledge stolen from 37 million customers, the corporate’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was fast to level the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a brand new documentary collection on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was only one downside with that idea: Their prime suspect had killed himself greater than a yr earlier than the hackers started publishing stolen consumer knowledge.
The new documentary, The Ashley Madison Affair, begins airing at present on Hulu within the United States and on Disney+ within the United Kingdom. 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, an information 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 lots of of hundreds 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 amazing 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 mother or father 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 is proof to counsel that in 2010 Harrison was directed to harass the proprietor of Ashleymadisonsucks.com into closing the location or promoting the area to Ashley Madison.
Ashley Madison’s mother or father 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. But after being knowledgeable that Bradshaw was not topic to Canadian trademark legal guidelines, Avid Life supplied 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 totally different accounts on the free e-mail service Vistomail pretending to be Bradshaw, his then-girlfriend and their pals.
[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 an internet site he created referred to 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 ultimately. The website additionally claimed to incorporate the names, addresses and cellphone numbers of prime 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-Business[.]com, which Harrison devoted to “all those sorry ass corporate executives out there profiting from your hard work, organs, lives, ideas, intelligence, and wallets.” Copies of the location 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 abilities squarely towards the corporate. Ashley Madison’s long-suspected military of pretend 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 inner methods suggesting that a big proportion 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 methods wanted to provide the screenshots McNeill printed on-line. In one 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 is asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman requested, after being despatched an inventory of 9 e-mail addresses.
“It appears to be the email address Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.
“And his access was never shut off until today?,” requested the corporate’s basic counsel Mike Dacks.
A Biderman e-mail from 2012.
What prompted the info scientist Bullock to achieve out have been gobs of anti-Semitic diatribes from Harrison, who had taken to labeling Biderman and others “greedy Jew bastards.”
“So good luck, I’m sure we’ll talk again soon, but for now, Ive got better things in the oven,” Harrison wrote to Biderman after his employment contract with Ashley Madison was terminated. “Just remember I outsmarted you last time and I will outsmart and out maneuver you this time too, by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”
A 2012 e-mail from William Harrison to former Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.
Harrison signed his threatening missive with the salutation, “We are 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 concentrating on Biderman and different Ashley Madison executives with menacing nameless emails and spoofed cellphone calls laced with profanity and anti-Semitic language.
But on Mar. 5, 2014, Harrison dedicated suicide by capturing himself within the head with a handgun. This reality was apparently unknown to Biderman and different Ashley Madison executives greater than a yr 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 is The Chaos Creator, and what else transpired between Harrison and Ashley Madison previous to his dying? We’ll discover these questions in Part II of this story, to be printed early subsequent week.