14 DAY TRIAL // In two articles penned for IBTimes UK, John McAfee, founder and former CEO of cyber security firm McAfee, made a pretty solid case in which he attributed the Ashely Madison hack to one of the company's employee, and more precisely to a "female" worker.
While a hacker group called The Impact Team claimed responsibility for hacking the Ashely Madison adult dating website, and then released 30GB of data on two different occasions, Mr. McAfee doesn't buy this scenario.
There are suspicions about a hacking group that never existed until the Ashley Madison incident
According to the first article he wrote, he notices how "the group's name has never appeared in any prior hack. The name has not surfaced at any time, neither in the deep web nor the dark web, nor anywhere else."
Also, with the prevalence of hacking tools available online and with The Impact Team bragging they got access to one of the server root passwords, this could easily been carried out by one single individual, without requiring multiple hackers to work together.
Additionally, after analyzing all the data available online from the Ashley Madison leak, Mr. McAfee is 100% sure this is the work of an employee.
“McAfee: It was an inside job.”
Ignoring the user account details, McAfee arrived at this conclusion by taking a look over the internal documents that were also leaked.
"Hackers don't have all the time in the world, so they pick and choose wisely," said John McAfee. "These are just a few of the many strangely included files that would take even a top notch hacker years to gather, and seem to have little or no value."
He is referring to the raw source code of internal applications the Ashely Madison staff created, statuses and IP addresses for all Ashley Madison servers, stock option agreements, office layout plans, and detailed activity charts for every Ashley Madison department.
As Mr. McAfee puts it, "of what value would this be considering the hacker had already made off with potentially billions," meaning that the hacker already had details about credit card transactions and personal user information, data more than necessary for committing various types of online fraud.
John McAfee thinks the inside job was carried out by a woman
Another important piece of evidence to support his findings are the manifests released with each data leak.
Analyzing these texts, Mr. McAfee saw a general ill sentiment towards two persons, Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman and also the company's VP of Information Technology.
Additionally, the texts also included the names of "employees that are liked and are doing a good job," which come to support McAfee's conclusion as for this being an inside job, carried out by someone that was on a personal crusade.
The same manifests also included some words like "scumbags" and "cheating dirtbags" when referring to men, along with mentions of someone "spitefully" joining Ashley Madison after Valentine's Day.
We'll let John McAffee explain it for you if you can reach the conclusion he's trying to get you to reach: "Anyone who ever had a significant other knows that women rate Valentine's Day higher than Christmas, and men think so little of it that they have to remind each other the day is nearing. To call an act the day after Valentines Day 'spiteful', is a thought that would enter few men's minds. If this does not convince you then you need to get out of the house more often."
John McAfee may do some crazy stuff sometimes, but he can sure diagnose a security incident, that's for sure.