Originally Posted by
sonatine
I believe the inside job part. I thought the same thing when I heard the details of the amount of data that was breached, but didn't say much about it because I thought Ashley Madison already stated initially that they suspected it was a disgruntled (male) contractor. (I haven't heard much about the contractor since then, though.)
I don't necessarily buy the female angle, though. I understand McAfee's logic, but I think he's stretching.
I actually engaged in this sort ofc gender-critical thinking fairly often in the past when I used to frequent chat rooms. When a suspected fake account was there, I would also consider whether I felt the actual person behind the account was actually male or female. I would deduce this from a variety of factors, from the (fake) picture they chose to use, their general aggression, topics of interest, whom they chose to PM, and their word/phrase choices.
A good example involved a fake MALE account where the person used a picture of a clean-cut, "cute" teenage guy. The user clearly wasn't the guy in the picture, but was the actual person behind it male or female? I determined that it was highly likely to be a female behind the account, because a male using a fake picture of another guy would usually choose a muscular/hyper-masculine guy, while a woman would be much more likely to choose one who is simply "cute". Turned out I was right -- it was a 35-year-old woman behind the account.
Anyway, getting back to the Ashley Madison hack, McAfee claims that it's a female because of two things written by the hacker:
- The cheating guys on the site were referred to as "scumbags", and that's supposedly what a female would say to describe a male cheater.
- The hacker talked about a member on the site "spitefully creating an account on AshleyMadison the day after Valentine's Day" -- something a woman is much more likely to think when they see February 15, whereas a man will not think on those terms.
The "scumbags" part is really reaching. Look at the front page of PFA, and you will see me referring to "scumbags" in the site's mission statement. People have called me many things on these forum, but feminine has never been one of them. I see male posters using the word "scumbags" all the time on various forums (not just poker), and it's generally used to refer to anyone engaging in dishonest/shady behavior. So that's not a tell at all. You don't have to be a woman to think poorly of guys who seek to cheat on their wives.
The Valentine's Day "spitefully" comment gave me more pause, but again, I don't think it means that much. Keep in mind that the hacker is likely engaging in deflective tactics to make people believe a different motive for the breach than actually occurred. So if the hacker was indeed a consultant angry at how he was treated by AshleyMadison when he worked for them, he doesn't want to give ANY clue that his motivation was frustration with behind-the-scenes office issues, or otherwise the finger will point to him quickly. Instead, he seizes upon the obvious "reason" for the hack -- a disdain for the company's business practices and their cheating clientele.
Therefore, when releasing statements about the hack, the hacker makes CERTAIN that you understand he sees the clientele as "scumbags", and that a particular client who signed up on February 15th was "spiteful" because it was the day after Valentine's Day. The hacker initially spent time making sure everyone understood that AshleyMadison was a scam (which it was), where there were almost no real active female members, and where the "full deletion" paid feature was a farce.
So you read all of that and get the impression that this was just a hacktivist who wanted to expose both a shady company and the asshole clientele who used them.
It's similar to what Chucky has been doing to me on his blogs. His actual source of anger (as proven by the PMs I recently posted) stemmed from my refusal to remove a silly GIF of him, taken from a scam video he did. His stated reasoning on his blogs involves "exposing" me for all kinds of unrelated stuff that he is either making up or twisting to suit his rhetoric. So he's hoping that the reader doesn't see "bitter, vindictive, threatening former PFA user", but rather sees a brave soul who is exposing an evil man.
Same type of shit.
But I really do believe it was someone pissed at the company itself for internal matters, and this is their revenge.
Bottom line is that McAfee should stick to technical analysis and leave the psychological determinations to the experts.
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