Vice News' Motherboard just published an interview with the hackers who claim responsibility for the Ashley Madison breach, known as The Impact Team.
Joseph Cox emailed with The Impact Team, and asked about their motivations for the hack.
"We were in Avid Life Media a long time to understand and get everything," Impact Team told Motherboard.
"Finally we watched Ashley Madison signups growing and human trafficking on the sites. Everyone is saying 37 million! Blackmail users! We didn't blackmail users. Avid Life Media blackmailed them. But any hacking team could have. We did it to stop the next 60 million. Avid Life Media is like a drug dealer abusing addicts."
I wonder who these guys really are? Your conspiracy theories in the comments. And don't say the FBI, because that's so obvious, or at least that's what I heard on Art Bell last night.
In case you haven't been following our Ashley Madison/Impact Team hacking coverage, here is the tl;dr in this Q&A intro:
The hackers behind the breach, who call themselves The Impact Team, first released snippets of the data back in July. After nearly 30 days, they then dumped 10GB of customer information, shortly followed by another 20GB of internal data. Minutes ago, the hackers also posted a third data dump.
And here are some of the nitty gritties we've all been looking for:
MOTHERBOARD: How did you hack Avid Life Media? Was it hard?
The Impact Team: We worked hard to make fully undetectable attack, then got in and found nothing to bypass.
What was their security like?
Bad. Nobody was watching. No security. Only thing was segmented network. You could use Pass1234 from the internet to VPN to root on all servers.
When did you start hacking them? Years ago?
A long time ago. [Note: in a README file in the first data dump, the hackers wrote that they had been collecting information from the company "over the past few years."]
What other data from Avid Life Media do you have?
300GB of employee emails and docs from internal network. Tens of thousands of Ashley Madison user pictures. Some Ashley Madison user chats and messages. 1/3 of pictures are dick pictures and we won't dump. Not dumping most employee emails either. Maybe other executives.
