by Y4NK33 PL4N3T » August 27th, 2015, 7:00 pm
Security expert claims to have found Ashley Madison hacker
The well-known security researcher Brian Krebs claims he knows who carried out the hack of the infidelity website Ashley Madison.
Krebs claims the Ashley Madison hack was likely conducted by the Twitter user “Thadeus Zu,” or @deuszu.
Krebs says Thadeus Zu tweeted the massive cache of Ashley Madison user data using the same proprietary source code as the so-called Impact Team, which has claimed responsibility for the hack.
The tweets were sent well before mainstream media reported on the data dump.
The Toronto Police Department is spearheading an investigation into the Ashley Madison hack, which last week revealed the personal data of up to 37 million clients.
The website’s parent company, Avid Life Media, is offering a $500,000 Canadian cash reward for information leading to the arrest of the hackers.
Krebs, who downloaded the entire Twitter history of @deuszu, says the user has a history of hacking government agencies and then playing an AC/DC song through their computers — the same one that played on Ashley Madison officials' computers when they learned they’d been hacked.
Still, trolling hacked organizations with “Thunderstruck” is not a smoking gun.
Thadeus Zu says several tweets that he was not part of the hack, although he regularly uses the pronoun “we” when discussing the group’s actions, Krebs reports.
