An Insider Betrayed Ashley Madison

When the giant data breach at infidelity website Ashley Madison made headlines last month, the CEO of the site's owner was quick to claim the caper was an inside job.

He had the attacker's profile and work credentials, Avid Life Media's CEO Noel Biderman told ace cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Though not an employee, the individual had accessed the company's technical services.

Biderman is no longer at ALM -- he resigned last week after emails stolen from Ashley Madison exposed his infidelities -- but his inside-job assertion lives on.

More life was breathed into the idea by none other than John McAfee, the eccentric founder of a security firm that bears his name, although Intel now owns it and McAfee is no longer involved.

The data contains MySQL dumps, not copies of the data turned into a .csv file as is typical of an external data breach, McAfee pointed out.

In addition, the data includes lots of information that suggests inside access, such as employee stock options, the layout of the Ashley Madison offices, and the source code of every program ever written by the company's employees.

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