Despite the massive fallout of the Ashley Madison breach, including the $578 million class action suit earlier reported by HNGN, the cheating website has been considered a victim. However, an internal email conversation between Raja Bhatia, Ashley Madison's founding CTO, and Noel Biderman, CEO of its parent company Avid Life Media, could obliterate this perspective as it revealed that the duo may have plotted to hack a competing website.
The Impact Team - the group that claimed responsibility for hacking Ashley Madison - has included a 30 gigabyte archive lifted from Biderman's email account, which showed that Bhatia exploited a security hole at a competing website, nerve.com. A message was sent to Biderman, informing the CEO of the security hole and his intent.
"They did a very lousy job building their platform. I got their entire user base... email, including in the message a link to a Github archive with a sample of the database. Also, I can turn any non paying user into a paying user, vice versa, compose messages between users, check unread stats, etc.," Bhatia wrote, according to Krebs On Security.
The trail of email correspondence, which began in November 2012, shows an evidence of collusion or, at least, an acceptance on the part of Biderman, noted the Silicon Republic.
Nerve.com is a digital magazine about sex which launched a dating service similar to Ashley Madison. The hacking must be the reason why a potential buyout of nerve.com by ALM suddenly went cold, noted the Silicon Republic.
In fairness to Biderman, his conversation with Bhatia included an email in 2013 that asked whether they should notify Nerve.com about the security risk. However, "although the emails discuss setting up a phone call with Nerve.com, it's not clear if ALM did disclose the vulnerability," Wired learned. Later correspondence further revealed that Biderman increasingly saw the fall of Ashley Madison's competitors as a business opportunity.
Biderman and Bhatia have so far remained mum about this new development. Avid Life Media, however, claimed that the emails were taken out of context.
"Nerve was exploring strategic partnerships in May of 2012 and reached out to Noel to determine Avid Life Media's interest in the property. At the time Noel did not act on that opportunity," an ALM representative told Motherboard.
