SEO Expert Hired and Fired By Ashley Madison Turned on Company, Promising Revenge
Summary: KrebsOnSecurity reports that Ashley Madison's parent firm Avid Life Media hired SEO specialist William Brewster Harrison in March 2010, and that after his November 2011 termination the company suspected him of using underhanded SEO techniques to make Google autocomplete "Jew" and "Jewish" for CEO Noel Biderman's name, surfacing Stormfront links. The Impact Team later leaked 60 gigabytes of user data on 37 million users in August 2015, and Biderman told Krebs on July 19, 2015 that the culprit was "a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services."
What's compelling: No one has been charged in the hack, yet the leaked emails show ALM's own counsel had reported Harrison to Toronto police over hundreds of harassing messages and spoofed calls before the breach - a documented insider-risk trail that did not prevent 37 million users' data from being published.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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