Ashley Madison Offering $500K Reward for Info on Hackers

Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the hacker or hackers behind the breach of its network.

The announcement was made by Bryce Evans, acting staff superintendent of the Toronto police. ALM is a Canada-based company.

“Today I can confirm that Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 reward to anyone providing information that leads to the identification, arrest and prosecution of the person or persons responsible for the leak of the Ashley Madison database,” Evans said, according to the BBC.

He also said that the police so far had two confirmed reports of suicides as a result of data leaked by the hackers. The hackers made good on a threat last week to release sensitive customer data they stole the month before, which included some 36 million email addresses associated with accounts that customers set up on the cheating web site. The data also included real names, addresses and phone numbers of people who paid for access to the site with a credit card. ALM has hired numerous forensic investigators to research the breach.

Evans also revealed an interesting detail about the hack. He noted that workers at ALM first learned of the breach on July 12 when employees logged in to their computers and were confronted by a message from the hackers. He didn’t indicate what the message said, but noted that it was
accompanied by music—specifically, AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”

Notably, this was the same music that accompanied a hack in 2012 that struck computers at an Iranian nuclear facility. This doesn’t, however, mean that the same hackers are behind both breaches. The ALM hackers could simply have copied the tactic.

In the hack against Iran, the attackers used a worm that struck computers at two facilities in Natanz and Fordo that are used to enrich uranium hexafluouride gas.