When the marital infidelity web site AshleyMadison.com discovered in July 2015 that hackers had 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. However as a brand new documentary collection on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was only one drawback with that concept: Their high suspect had killed himself greater than a yr earlier than the hackers started publishing stolen person knowledge.
The brand new documentary, The Ashley Madison Affair, begins airing in the present day on Hulu in america and on Disney+ in the UK. The collection options interviews with safety consultants and journalists, Ashley Madison executives, victims of the breach and jilted spouses.
The collection additionally touches on stunning 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 revealed on-line in 2015.
Wall to Wall reached out in July 2022 about collaborating with Bullock after KrebsOnSecurity revealed A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach. That piece explored how Biderman — who’s Jewish — had develop 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 value. Apropos of my retrospective report, Bullock discovered that an important many messages in Biderman’s inbox had been belligerent and anti-Semitic screeds from a former Ashley Madison worker named William Brewster Harrison.
William Harrison’s employment contract with Ashley Madison guardian 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 recommend 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 guardian 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 had been topic to an unrelenting marketing campaign of on-line harassment and blackmail. It now seems these assaults had 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 associates.
[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 ultimately. 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 exhibits he additionally ran Bash-a-Enterprise[.]com, which Harrison devoted to “all these sorry ass company executives on the market profiting out of your arduous work, organs, lives, concepts, 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 expertise 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 revealed screenshots apparently taken from Ashley Madison’s inner programs suggesting that a big share of the feminine accounts on the service had been computer-operated bots.
Ashley Madison’s executives understood that solely a handful of workers on the time would have had entry to the programs wanted to supply the screenshots McNeill revealed on-line. In a single alternate on Aug. 16, 2012, Ashley Madison’s director of IT was requested to supply a listing of all firm workers with omnipotent administrator entry.
“Who or what’s asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman requested, after being despatched a listing of 9 e-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 in the present day?,” requested the corporate’s common counsel Mike Dacks.
A Biderman e-mail from 2012.
What prompted the info scientist Bullock to achieve out had been gobs of anti-Semitic diatribes from Harrison, who had taken to labeling Biderman and others “grasping Jew bastards.”
“So good luck, I’m positive we’ll speak once more quickly, however for now, Ive received 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 maintaining myself far distant from the motion and simply having fun with 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’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 capturing himself within the head with a handgun. This truth 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’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 revealed early subsequent week.
