One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents.

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who was puzzled over an email he’d just received saying he needed to review and complete a supplied W-9 tax form. The missive was made to appear as if it were part of a mailbox delivery report from Microsoft 365 about messages that had failed to deliver.

The reader, who asked to remain anonymous, said the phishing message contained an attachment that appeared to have a file extension of “.pdf,” but something about it seemed off. For example, when he downloaded and tried to rename the file, the right arrow key on the keyboard moved his cursor to the left, and vice versa.

The file included in this phishing scam uses what’s known as a “right-to-left override” or RLO character. RLO is a special character within unicode — an encoding system that allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used — that supports languages written from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Look carefully at the screenshot below and you’ll notice that while Microsoft Windows says the file attached to the phishing message is named “lme.pdf,” the full filename is “fdp.eml” spelled backwards. In essence, this is a .eml file — an electronic mail format or email saved in plain text — masquerading as a .PDF file.

“The email came through Microsoft Office 365 with all the detections turned on and was not caught,” the reader continued. “When the same email is sent through Mimecast, Mimecast is smart enough to detect the encoding and it renames the attachment to ‘___fdp.eml.’ One would think Microsoft would have had plenty of time by now to address this.”

Indeed, KrebsOnSecurity first covered RLO-based phishing attacks back in 2011, and even then it wasn’t a new trick.

Opening the .eml file generates a rendering of a webpage that mimics an alert from Microsoft about wayward messages awaiting restoration to your inbox. Clicking on the “Restore Messages” link there bounces you through an open redirect on LinkedIn before forwarding to the phishing webpage.

As noted here last year, scammers have long taken advantage of a marketing feature on the business networking site which lets them create a LinkedIn.com link that bounces your browser to other websites, such as phishing pages that mimic top online brands (but chiefly Linkedin’s parent firm Microsoft).

The landing page after the LinkedIn redirect displays what appears to be an Office 365 login page, which is naturally a phishing website made to look like an official Microsoft Office property.

In summary, this phishing scam uses an old RLO trick to fool Microsoft Windows into thinking the attached file is something else, and when clicked the link uses an open redirect on a Microsoft-owned website (LinkedIn) to send people to a phishing page that spoofs Microsoft and tries to steal customer email credentials.

According to the latest figures from Check Point Software, Microsoft was by far the most impersonated brand for phishing scams in the second quarter of 2023, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all brand phishing attempts.

An unsolicited message that arrives with one of these .eml files as an attachment is more than likely to be a phishing lure. The best advice to sidestep phishing scams is to avoid clicking on links that arrive unbidden in emails, text messages and other mediums. Most phishing scams invoke a temporal element that warns of dire consequences should you fail to respond or act quickly.

If you’re unsure whether a message is legitimate, take a deep breath and visit the site or service in question manually — ideally, using a browser bookmark to avoid potential typosquatting sites.

Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online.

In a report released July 12, researchers at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs called the AVrecon botnet “one of the largest botnets targeting small-office/home-office (SOHO) routers seen in recent history,” and a crime machine that has largely evaded public attention since first being spotted in mid-2021.

“The malware has been used to create residential proxy services to shroud malicious activity such as password spraying, web-traffic proxying and ad fraud,” the Lumen researchers wrote.

Malware-based anonymity networks are a major source of unwanted and malicious web traffic directed at online retailers, Internet service providers (ISPs), social networks, email providers and financial institutions. And a great many of these “proxy” networks are marketed primarily to cybercriminals seeking to anonymize their traffic by routing it through an infected PC, router or mobile device.

Proxy services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source. Proxy services also let users appear to be getting online from nearly anywhere in the world, which is useful if you’re a cybercriminal who is trying to impersonate someone from a specific place.

Spur.us, a startup that tracks proxy services, told KrebsOnSecurity that the Internet addresses Lumen tagged as the AVrecon botnet’s “Command and Control” (C2) servers all tie back to a long-running proxy service called SocksEscort.

SocksEscort[.]com, is what’s known as a “SOCKS Proxy” service. The SOCKS (or SOCKS5) protocol allows Internet users to channel their Web traffic through a proxy server, which then passes the information on to the intended destination. From a website’s perspective, the traffic of the proxy network customer appears to originate from a rented/malware-infected PC tied to a residential ISP customer, not from the proxy service customer.

Spur tracks SocksEscort as a malware-based proxy offering, which means the machines doing the proxying of traffic for SocksEscort customers have been infected with malicious software that turns them into a traffic relay. Usually, these users have no idea their systems are compromised.

Spur says the SocksEscort proxy service requires customers to install a Windows based application in order to access a pool of more than 10,000 hacked devices worldwide.

“We created a fingerprint to identify the call-back infrastructure for SocksEscort proxies,” Spur co-founder Riley Kilmer said. “Looking at network telemetry, we were able to confirm that we saw victims talking back to it on various ports.”

According to Kilmer, AVrecon is the malware that gives SocksEscort its proxies.

“When Lumen released their report and IOCs [indicators of compromise], we queried our system for which proxy service call-back infrastructure overlapped with their IOCs,” Kilmer continued. “The second stage C2s they identified were the same as the IPs we labeled for SocksEscort.”

Lumen’s research team said the purpose of AVrecon appears to be stealing bandwidth – without impacting end-users – in order to create a residential proxy service to help launder malicious activity and avoid attracting the same level of attention from Tor-hidden services or commercially available VPN services.

“This class of cybercrime activity threat may evade detection because it is less likely than a crypto-miner to be noticed by the owner, and it is unlikely to warrant the volume of abuse complaints that internet-wide brute-forcing and DDoS-based botnets typically draw,” Lumen’s Black Lotus researchers wrote.

Preserving bandwidth for both customers and victims was a primary concern for SocksEscort in July 2022, when 911S5 — at the time the world’s largest known malware proxy network — got hacked and imploded just days after being exposed in a story here. Kilmer said after 911’s demise, SocksEscort closed its registration for several months to prevent an influx of new users from swamping the service.

Danny Adamitis, principal information security researcher at Lumen and co-author of the report on AVrecon, confirmed Kilmer’s findings, saying the C2 data matched up with what Spur was seeing for SocksEscort dating back to September 2022.

Adamitis said that on July 13 — the day after Lumen published research on AVrecon and started blocking any traffic to the malware’s control servers — the people responsible for maintaining the botnet reacted quickly to transition infected systems over to a new command and control infrastructure.

“They were clearly reacting and trying to maintain control over components of the botnet,” Adamitis said. “Probably, they wanted to keep that revenue stream going.”

Frustratingly, Lumen was not able to determine how the SOHO devices were being infected with AVrecon. Some possible avenues of infection include exploiting weak or default administrative credentials on routers, and outdated, insecure firmware that has known, exploitable security vulnerabilities.

WHO’S BEHIND SOCKSESCORT?

KrebsOnSecurity briefly visited SocksEscort last year and promised a follow-up on the history and possible identity of its proprietors. A review of the earliest posts about this service on Russian cybercrime forums suggests the 12-year-old malware proxy network is tied to a Moldovan company that also offers VPN software on the Apple Store and elsewhere.

SocksEscort began in 2009 as “super-socks[.]com,” a Russian-language service that sold access to thousands of compromised PCs that could be used to proxy traffic. Someone who picked the nicknames “SSC” and “super-socks” and email address “michvatt@gmail.com” registered on multiple cybercrime forums and began promoting the proxy service.

According to DomainTools.com, the apparently related email address “michdomain@gmail.com” was used to register SocksEscort[.]com, super-socks[.]com, and a few other proxy-related domains, including ip-score[.]com, segate[.]org seproxysoft[.]com, and vipssc[.]us. Cached versions of both super-socks[.]com and vipssc[.]us show these sites sold the same proxy service, and both displayed the letters “SSC” prominently at the top of their homepages.

According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the very first “SSC” identity registered on the cybercrime forums happened in 2009 at the Russian language hacker community Antichat, where SSC registered using the email address adriman@gmail.com. SSC asked fellow forum members for help in testing the security of a website they claimed was theirs: myiptest[.]com, which promised to tell visitors whether their proxy address was included on any security or anti-spam block lists.

DomainTools says myiptest[.]com was registered in 2008 to an Adrian Crismaru from Chisinau, Moldova. Myiptest[.]com is no longer responding, but a cached copy of it from Archive.org shows that for about four years it included in its HTML source a Google Analytics code of US-2665744, which was also present on more than a dozen other websites.

Most of the sites that once bore that Google tracking code are no longer online, but nearly all of them centered around services that were similar to myiptest[.]com, such as abuseipdb[.]com, bestiptest[.]com, checkdnslbl[.]com, dnsbltools[.]com and dnsblmonitor[.]com.

Each of these services were designed to help visitors quickly determine whether the Internet address they were visiting the site from was listed by any security firms as spammy, malicious or phishous. In other words, these services were designed so that proxy service users could easily tell if their rented Internet address was still safe to use for online fraud.

Another domain with the Google Analytics code US-2665744 was sscompany[.]net. An archived copy of the site says SSC stands for “Server Support Company,” which advertised outsourced solutions for technical support and server administration. The company was located in Chisinau, Moldova and owned by Adrian Crismaru.

Leaked copies of the hacked Antichat forum indicate the SSC identity tied to adriman@gmail.com registered on the forum using the IP address 71.229.207.214. That same IP was used to register the nickname “Deem3n®,” a prolific poster on Antichat between 2005 and 2009 who served as a moderator on the forum.

There was a Deem3n® user on the webmaster forum Searchengines.guru whose signature in their posts says they run a popular community catering to programmers in Moldova called sysadmin[.]md, and that they were a systems administrator for sscompany[.]net.

That same Google Analytics code is also now present on the homepages of wiremo[.]co and a VPN provider called HideIPVPN[.]com.

Wiremo sells software and services to help website owners better manage their customer reviews. Wiremo’s Contact Us page lists a “Server Management LLC” in Wilmington, DE as the parent company. Records from the Delaware Secretary of State indicate Crismaru is CEO of this company.

Server Management LLC is currently listed in Apple’s App Store as the owner of a “free” VPN app called HideIPVPN. The contact information on Crismaru’s LinkedIn page says his company websites include myiptest[.]com, sscompany[.]net, and hideipvpn[.]com.

“The best way to secure the transmissions of your mobile device is VPN,” reads HideIPVPN’s description on the Apple Store. “Now, we provide you with an even easier way to connect to our VPN servers. We will hide your IP address, encrypt all your traffic, secure all your sensitive information (passwords, mail credit card details, etc.) form [sic] hackers on public networks.”

Mr. Crismaru did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When asked about the company’s apparent connection to SocksEscort, Wiremo responded, “We do not control this domain and no one from our team is connected to this domain.” Wiremo did not respond when presented with the findings in this report.

Many things have changed since 2018, such as the names of the companies in the Fortune 100 list. But one aspect of that vaunted list that hasn’t shifted much since is that very few of these companies list any security professionals within their top executive ranks.

The next time you receive a breach notification letter that invariably says a company you trusted places a top priority on customer security and privacy, consider this: Only four of the Fortune 100 companies currently list a security professional in the executive leadership pages of their websites. This is actually down from five of the Fortune 100 in 2018, the last time KrebsOnSecurity performed this analysis.

A review of the executives pages published by the 2022 list of Fortune 100 companies found only four — BestBuy, Cigna, Coca-Cola,  and Walmart — that listed a Chief Security Officer (CSO) or Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in their highest corporate ranks.

One-third of last year’s Fortune 100 companies included a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in their executive stables; 40 listed Chief Information Officer (CIO) roles, but just 21 included a Chief Risk Officer (CRO).

As I noted in 2018, this is not to say that 96 percent of the Fortune 100 companies don’t have a CISO or CSO in their employ: A review of LinkedIn suggests that most of them in fact do have people in those roles, and experts say some of the largest multinational companies will have multiple people in these positions.

But it is interesting to note which executive positions the top companies deem worth publishing in their executive leadership pages. For example, 88 percent listed a Director of Human Resources (or “Chief People Officer”), and 37 out of 100 included a Chief Marketing Officer.

Not that these roles are somehow more or less important than that of a CISO/CSO within the organization. Nor is the average pay hugely different among all these roles. Yet, considering how much marketing (think consumer/customer data) and human resources (think employee personal/financial data) are impacted by your average data breach, it’s somewhat remarkable that more companies don’t list their chief security personnel among their top ranks.

One likely explanation as to why a great many companies still don’t include their security leaders within their highest echelons is that these employees do not report directly to the company’s CEO, board of directors, or Chief Risk Officer.

The CSO or CISO position traditionally has reported to an executive in a technical role, such as the CTO or CIO. But workforce experts say placing the CISO/CSO on unequal footing with the organization’s top leaders makes it more likely that cybersecurity and risk concerns will take a backseat to initiatives designed to increase productivity and generally grow the business.

“Separation of duties is a fundamental concept of security, whether we’re talking about cyber threats, employee fraud, or physical theft,” said Tari Schreider, an analyst with Datos Insights. “But that critical separation is violated every day with the CISO or CSO reporting to the heads of technology.”

IANS, an organization geared toward CISOs/CSOs and their teams, surveyed more than 500 organizations last year and found roughly 65 percent of CISOs still report to a technical leader, such as the CTO or CIO: IANS found 46 percent of CISOs reported to a CIO, with 15 percent reporting directly to a CTO.

Schreider said one big reason many CISOs and CSOs aren’t listed in corporate executive biographies at major companies is that these positions often do not enjoy the same legal and insurance protections afforded to other officers within the company.

Typically, larger companies will purchase a “Directors and Officers” liability policy that covers legal expenses should one of the organization’s top executives find themselves dragged into court over some business failing on the part of their employer. But organizations that do not offer this coverage to their security leaders are unlikely to list those positions in their highest ranks, Schreider said.

“It’s frankly shocking,” Schreider said, upon hearing that only four of the Fortune 100 listed any security personnel in their top executive hierarchies. “If the company isn’t going to give them legal cover, then why give them the responsibility for security? Especially when CISOs and CSOs shouldn’t own the risk, yet the majority of them carry the mantle of responsibility and they tend to be scapegoats” when the organization eventually gets hacked, he said.

Schreider said while Datos Insights focuses mostly on the financial and insurance industries, a recent Datos survey echoes the IANS findings from last year. Datos surveyed 25 of the largest financial institutions by asset size (two of which are no longer in existence), and found just 22 percent of CSOs/CISOs reported to the CEO. A majority — 65 percent — had their CSOs/CISOs reporting to either a CTO or CIO.

“I’ve looked at these types of statistics for years and they’ve never really changed that much,” Schreider said. “The CISO or CSO is in the purview of the technical stack from a management perspective. Right, wrong or indifferent, that’s what’s happening.”

Earlier this year, IT consulting firm Accenture released results from surveying more than 3,000 respondents from 15 industries across 14 countries about their security maturity levels. Accenture found that only about one-third of the organizations they surveyed had enough security maturity under their belts to have integrated security into virtually every aspect of their businesses — and this includes having CISOs or CSOs report to someone in charge of overseeing risk for the business as a whole.

Not surprisingly, Accenture also found that only a third of respondents considered cybersecurity risk “to a great extent” when evaluating overall enterprise risk.

“This highlights there is still some way to go to make cybersecurity a proactive, strategic necessity within the business,” the report concluded.

A spreadsheet tracking the prevalence of security leaders on the executive pages of the 2022 Fortune 100 firms is available here.

[This is Part II of a story published here last week on reporting that went into a new Hulu documentary series on the 2015 Ashley Madison hack.]

It was around 9 p.m. on Sunday, July 19, when I received a message through the contact form on KrebsOnSecurity.com that the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com had been hacked. The message contained links to confidential Ashley Madison documents, and included a manifesto that said a hacker group calling itself the Impact Team was prepared to leak data on all 37 million users unless Ashley Madison and a sister property voluntarily closed down within 30 days.

The message included links to files containing highly sensitive information, including snippets of leaked user account data, maps of internal AshleyMadison company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information.

A master employee contact list was among the documents leaked that evening. Helpfully, it included the cell phone number for Noel Biderman, then the CEO of Ashley Madison parent firm Avid Life Media (ALM). To my everlasting surprise, Biderman answered on the first ring and acknowledged they’d been hacked without even waiting to be asked.

“We’re on the doorstep of [confirming] who we believe is the culprit, and unfortunately that may have triggered this mass publication,” Biderman told me on July 19, just minutes before I published the first known public report about the breach. “I’ve got their profile right in front of me, all their work credentials. It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”

On Aug 18, 2015, the Impact Team posted a “Time’s up!” message online, along with links to 60 gigabytes of Ashley Madison user data. The data leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. Many other users lost their jobs or their marriages. To this day, nobody has been charged in the hack, and incredibly Ashley Madison remains a thriving company.

THE CHAOS MAKER

The former employee that Biderman undoubtedly had in mind on July 19, 2015 was William Brewster Harrison, a self-described expert in search engine optimization (SEO) tricks that are designed to help websites increase their rankings for various keywords in Google and other search engines.

It is evident that Harrison was Biderman’s top suspect immediately after the breach became public because — in addition to releasing data on 37 million users a month later in August 2015 — the hackers also dumped three years worth of email they stole from Biderman. And Biderman’s inbox is full of messages about hate-filled personal attacks from Harrison.

A Native of Northern Virginia, Harrison eventually settled in North Carolina, had a son with his then-wife, and started a fence-building business. ALM hired Harrison in March 2010 to promote its various adult brands online, and it is clear that one of his roles was creating and maintaining female profiles on Ashley Madison, and creating blogs that were made to look like they were written by women who’d just joined Ashley Madison.

It appears Harrison was working as an affiliate of Ashley Madison prior to his official employment with the company, which suggests that Harrison had already demonstrated he could drive signups to the service and help improve its standing in the search engine rankings.

What is less clear is whether anyone at ALM ever performed a basic background check on Harrison before hiring him. Because if they had, the results almost certainly would have given them pause. Virginia prosecutors charged the young 20-something Harrison with a series of misdemeanors, including trespassing, unlawful entry, drunk in public, and making obscene phone calls.

In 2008, North Carolina authorities charged Harrison with criminal extortion, a case that was transferred to South Carolina before ultimately being dismissed. In December 2009, Harrison faced charges of false imprisonment, charges that were also dropped by the local district attorney.

By the time Ashley Madison officially hired him, Harrison’s life was falling apart. His fence business had failed, and he’d just filed for bankruptcy. Also, his marriage had soured, and after a new arrest for driving under the influence, he was in danger of getting divorced, losing access to his son, and/or going to jail.

It also seems likely that nobody at ALM bothered to look at the dozens of domain names registered to Harrison’s various Vistomail.com email addresses, because had they done so they likely would have noticed two things.

One is that Harrison had a history of creating websites to lambaste companies he didn’t like, or that he believed had slighted him or his family in some way. Some of these websites included content that defamed and doxed executives, such as bash-a-business[.]com, google-your-business[.]com, contact-a-ceo[.]com, lowes-is-a-cancer[.]com (according to Harrison, the home improvement chain once employed his wife).

A background check on Harrison’s online footprint also would have revealed he was a self-styled rapper who claimed to be an active menace to corporate America. Harrison’s website lyrical-gangsta[.]com included a number of works, such as “Slim Thug — I Run — Remix Spoof,” which are replete with menacing words for unnamed corporate executives:

[HOOK]
I surf the net all night n day (the web love thug)
cuz I still surf the net all night n day
yuhh I type for my mind, got smart for my ego
still running circles round them, what’s good?
cuz I still surf, the net all night n day,
I cant stay away.

They don’t make to [sic] many hackers like me
bonafide hustler certified G
still pumpin’ the TOP 10 results
if you got the right dough!
think the results are fake? sucka Google ME
smarter than executives, bigger then Wal-Mart
Nelly strugglin’ with the fact that I’m #1 NOW
street boys know me, ain’t nuttin’ new
about to make my mill, with an all new crew
I-95 execs don’t know what to do, or where to go
watchin them stocks evaporate all their dough
I already left the hood, got up off the streets
its in my blood im a gangsta till Im deceased

moving lumber for money or typin’ in a zone
all night hackin’ till 6 in the mornin
that shit im focusin’ on, stronger then cologne
you can prolly smell the jealousy
through your LCD screen
if you still broke– better work for some green
called them Fortune execs on that legal bluff
cuz the Feds busy raidin other stuff
Imma run the Net til im six feet under
I’m a leave my mark — no reason to wonder
(Yea Yea)

The same theme appears in another rap (“The Hacker Backstage”) penned by Harrison’s rapper alter ego — “Chaos Dog:”

…this hacker was born to write
bust off the rhymes and watch em take flight
you know all about them corporate jets
and handing out pinkslips without regrets
oversized companies are the problem

well, I’ve got a solution
It’s called good ol’ fashioned retribution
file bankruptcy, boycott you like Boston colonists
Corporate America cant stop this Eminem style columnist
2pac would have honored my style
Im the next generation of hacker inspiration
Americans don’t want a corporate nation
All that DOW Jones shit is a dying sensation

In addition to pimping Ashley Madison with fake profiles and phony user blogs, it appears Harrison also went after the company’s enemies during the brief time he was an employee. As noted in Part I of this story, Harrison used multiple pseudonymous Vistomail.com email addresses to harass the owners of AshleyMadisonSucks[.]com into selling or shutting down the site.

When the owner of AshleyMadisonSucks[.]com refused to sell the domain, he and his then-girlfriend were subject to an unrelenting campaign of online harassment and blackmail. It now appears those attacks were perpetrated by Harrison, who sent emails from different accounts at the free email service Vistomail pretending to be the domain owner, his then-girlfriend and their friends. Harrison even went after the domain owner’s lawyer and wife, listing them both on his Contact-A-CEO[.]com website.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY

Things started going sideways for Ashley Madison when Harrison’s employment contract was terminated in November 2011. The leaked emails do not explain why Harrison was fired, but his mercurial temperament likely played a major role. According to Harrison, it was because he had expressed some moral reservations with certain aspects of his duties, although he was not specific on that point and none of this could be confirmed.

Shortly after Harrison was fired, the company’s executives began noticing that Google was auto-completing the words “Jew” and “Jewish” whenever someone searched for Biderman’s name. The results returned when one accepted Google’s recommended search at the time filled the first page with links to Stormfront, a far-right, neo-Nazi hate group. The company strongly suspected someone was using underhanded SEO techniques to slander and attack its CEO.

In July 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published a retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison breach which found that Biderman had become the subject of increasing ire from members of Stormfront and other extremists groups in the years leading up to the hack. According to the neo-Nazi groups, Biderman was a worthy target of their harassment not just because he was a successful Jewish CEO, but also because his company was hellbent on destroying Christian morals and families.

Biderman’s leaked emails show that in February 2012 he hired Brian Cuban — the attorney brother of Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one the main “sharks” on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank. Through Cuban, Ashley Madison appealed their case to both Google and to the Anti-Defamation League, but neither was apparently able or willing to help.

Also in early January 2012, Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives found themselves inundated with anonymous Vistomail.com emails that were replete with profanity and slurs against Jews. Although he used fake names and email addresses, Harrison made little effort to hide his identity in several of these nastygrams.

One particularly ugly message from Harrison even included a link to a Youtube video he’d put online of his young son playing basketball for a school team. That Youtube video was included in an email wherein Harrison – then separated from his wife — lamented all the hours he spent working for Ashley Madison up in Canada instead of spending time with his son.

Harrison then turned to making threatening phone calls to Ashley Madison executives. In one incident in March 2012, Harrison called the company’s former director of Human Resources using a caller ID spoofing service to make it look like he was calling from inside the building.

ALM’s lawyers contacted the Toronto police in response to Harrison’s harassment.

“For Will to have disguised his phone number as Mark’s strongly suggest he has hacked my email, legal counsel for the opposing side in a perceived legal dispute,” ALM VP and general counsel Mike Dacks wrote in a letter to a detective at the Toronto Police. “Over the months of his many hundreds of emails he alluded a number of times to undertaking cyberattacks against us and this was noted in my original report to police.”

Based on the exchanges in Bidernman’s inbox it appears those appeals to the Toronto authorities were successful in having Harrison barred from being able to enter Canada.

ALM also contacted a detective in Harrison’s home county in North Carolina. But when the local police paid a visit to Harrison’s home to follow up on the harassment complaints, Harrison fled out his back porch, injuring himself after jumping off the second-story deck.

It is unclear if the police ever succeeded in interviewing Harrison in response to the harassment complaints from ALM. The Raleigh police officer contacted by ALM did not respond to requests for information. But the visit from the local cops only seemed to embolden and anger Harrison even more, and Biderman’s emails indicate the harassment continued after this incident.

HUMAN DECOYS

Then in August 2012, the former sex worker turned blogger and activist Maggie McNeill published screenshots from an internal system that Ashley Madison used called the “Human Decoy Interface,” which was a fancy way of describing a system built to manage phony female accounts on the service.

The screenshots appeared to show that a great many female accounts were in fact bots designed to bring in paying customers. Ashley Madison was always free to join, but users had to pay if they wished to chat directly with other users.

Although Harrison had been fired nearly a year earlier, Biderman’s leaked emails show that Harrison’s access to Ashley Madison’s internal tools wasn’t revoked until after the screenshots were posted online and the company began reviewing which employee accounts had access to the Human Decoy Interface.

“Who or what is asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman asked, after being sent a list of nine email addresses.

“It appears to be the email address Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.

“And his access was never shut off until today?,” asked the company’s general counsel Mike Dacks.

TRUTH BOMBS

Biderman’s leaked emails suggest that Harrison stopped his harassment campaign sometime after 2012. A decade later, KrebsOnSecurity sought to track down and interview Harrison. Finding nobody at his former addresses and phone numbers in North Carolina, KrebsOnSecurity wound up speaking with Will’s stepmother, Tena Nauheim, who lives with Will’s dad in Northern Virginia.

Nauheim quickly dropped two big truth bombs after patiently listening to my spiel about why I was calling and looking for Mr. Harrison. The first was that Will was brought up Jewish, although he did not practice the faith: A local rabbi and friend of the family gave the service at Will’s funeral in 2014.

Nauheim also shared that her stepson had killed himself in 2014, shooting himself in the head with a handgun. Will’s mother discovered his body.

“Will committed suicide in March 2014,” Nauheim shared. “I’ve heard all those stories you just mentioned. Will was severely mentally ill. He was probably as close to a sociopath as I can imagine anyone being. He was also a paranoid schizophrenic who wouldn’t take his medication.”

William B. Harrison died on March 5, 2014, nearly 16 months before The Impact Team announced they’d hacked Ashley Madison.

Nauheim said she constantly felt physically threatened when Will was around. But she had trouble believing that her stepson was a raging anti-Semite. She also said she thought the timing of Will’s suicide effectively ruled him out as a suspect in the 2015 Ashley Madison hack.

“Considering the date of death, I’m not sure if he’s your guy,” Nauheim offered toward the end of our conversation.

[There is one silver lining to Will Harrison’s otherwise sad tale: His widow has since remarried, and her new husband agreed to adopt their son as his own.]

ANALYSIS

Does Harrison’s untimely death rule him out as a suspect, as his stepmom suggested? This remains an open question. In a parting email to Biderman in late 2012, Harrison signed his real name and said he was leaving, but not going away.

“So good luck, I’m sure we’ll talk again soon, but for now, I’ve got better things in the oven,” Harrison wrote. “Just remember I outsmarted you last time and I will outsmart you and out maneuver you this time too, by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”

Nothing in the leaked Biderman emails suggests that Ashley Madison did much to revamp the security of its computer systems in the wake of Harrison’s departure and subsequent campaign of harassment — apart from removing an administrator account of his a year after he’d already left the company.

KrebsOnSecurity found nothing in Harrison’s extensive domain history suggesting he had any real malicious hacking skills. But given the clientele that typically employed his skills — the adult entertainment industry — it seems likely Harrison was at least conversant in the dark arts of “Black SEO,” which involves using underhanded or else downright illegal methods to game search engine results.

Armed with such experience, it would not have been difficult for Harrison to have worked out a way to maintain access to working administrator accounts at Ashley Madison. If that in fact did happen, it would have been trivial for him to sell or give those credentials to someone else.

Or to something else. Like Nazi groups. As KrebsOnSecurity reported last year, in the six months leading up to the July 2015 hack, Ashley Madison and Biderman became a frequent subject of derision across multiple neo-Nazi websites.

On Jan. 14, 2015, a member of the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront posted a lively thread about Ashley Madison in the general discussion area titled, “Jewish owned dating website promoting adultery.”

On July 3, 2015, Andrew Anglin, the editor of the alt-right publication Daily Stormer, posted excerpts about Biderman from a story titled, “Jewish Hyper-Sexualization of Western Culture,” which referred to Biderman as the “Jewish King of Infidelity.”

On July 10, a mocking montage of Biderman photos with racist captions was posted to the extremist website Vanguard News Network, as part of a thread called “Jews normalize sexual perversion.”

Some readers have suggested that the data leaked by the Impact Team could have originally been stolen by Harrison. But that timeline does not add up given what we know about the hack. For one thing, the financial transaction records leaked from Ashley Madison show charges up until mid-2015. Also, the final message in the archive of Biderman’s stolen emails was dated July 7, 2015 — almost two weeks before the Impact Team would announce their hack.

Whoever hacked Ashley Madison clearly wanted to disrupt the company as a business, and disgrace its CEO as the endgame. The Impact Team’s intrusion struck just as Ashley Madison’s parent was preparing go public with an initial public offering (IPO) for investors. Also, the hackers stated that while they stole all emplyee emails, they were only interested in leaking Biderman’s.

Also, the Impact Team had to know that ALM would never comply with their demands to dismantle Ashley Madison and Established Men. In 2014, ALM reported revenues of $115 million. There was little chance the company was going to shut down some of its biggest money machines.

Hence, it appears the Impact Team’s goal all along was to create prodigious amounts of drama and tension by announcing the hack of a major cheating website, and then let that drama play out over the next few months as millions of exposed Ashley Madison users freaked out and became the targets of extortion attacks and public shaming.

After the Impact Team released Biderman’s email archives, several media outlets pounced on salacious exchanges in those messages as supposed proof he had carried on multiple affairs. Biderman resigned as CEO of Ashley Madison on Aug. 28, 2015.

Complicating things further, it appears more than one malicious party may have gained access to Ashley’s Madison’s network in 2015 or possibly earlier. Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 recorded a series of posts by a user with the handle “Brutium” on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Antichat between 2014 and 2016.

Brutium routinely advertised the sale of large, hacked databases, and on Jan. 24, 2015, this user posted a thread offering to sell data on 32 million Ashley Madison users. However, there is no indication whether anyone purchased the information. Brutium’s profile has since been removed from the Antichat forum.

I realize this ending may be unsatisfying for many readers, as it is for me. The story I wrote in 2015 about the Ashley Madison hack is still the biggest scoop I’ve published here (in terms of traffic), yet it remains perhaps the single most frustrating investigation I’ve ever pursued. But my hunch is that there is still more to this story that has yet to unfold.

When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was just one problem with that theory: Their top suspect had killed himself more than a year before the hackers began publishing stolen user data.

The new documentary, The Ashley Madison Affair, begins airing today on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in the United Kingdom. The series features interviews with security experts and journalists, Ashley Madison executives, victims of the breach and jilted spouses.

The series also touches on shocking new details unearthed by KrebsOnSecurity and Jeremy Bullock, a data scientist who worked with the show’s producers at the Warner Bros. production company Wall to Wall Media. Bullock had spent many hours poring over the hundreds of thousands of emails that the Ashley Madison hackers stole from Biderman and published online in 2015.

Wall to Wall reached out in July 2022 about collaborating with Bullock after KrebsOnSecurity published A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach. That piece explored how Biderman — who is Jewish — had become the target of concerted harassment campaigns by anti-Semitic and far-right groups online in the months leading up to the hack.

Whoever hacked Ashley Madison had access to all employee emails, but they only released Biderman’s messages — three years worth. Apropos of my retrospective report, Bullock found that a great many messages in Biderman’s inbox were belligerent and anti-Semitic screeds from a former Ashley Madison employee named William Brewster Harrison.

The messages show that Harrison was hired in March 2010 to help promote Ashley Madison online, but the messages also reveal Harrison was heavily involved in helping to create and cultivate phony female accounts on the service.

There is evidence to suggest that in 2010 Harrison was directed to harass the owner of Ashleymadisonsucks.com into closing the site or selling the domain to Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison’s parent company — Toronto-based Avid Life Media — filed a trademark infringement complaint in 2010 that succeeded in revealing a man named Dennis Bradshaw as the owner. But after being informed that Bradshaw was not subject to Canadian trademark laws, Avid Life offered to buy AshleyMadisonSucks.com for $10,000.

When Bradshaw refused to sell the domain, he and his then-girlfriend were subject to an unrelenting campaign of online harassment and blackmail. It now appears those attacks were perpetrated by Harrison, who sent emails from different accounts at the free email service Vistomail pretending to be Bradshaw, his then-girlfriend and their friends.

[As the documentary points out, the domain AshleyMadisonSucks.com was eventually transferred to Ashley Madison, which then shrewdly used it for advertising and to help debunk theories about why its service was supposedly untrustworthy].

Harrison even went after Bradshaw’s lawyer and wife, listing them both on a website he created called Contact-a-CEO[.]com, which Harrison used to besmirch the name of major companies — including several past employers — all entities he believed had slighted him or his family in some way. The site also claimed to include the names, addresses and phone numbers of top CEOs.

An exhaustive analysis of domains registered to the various Vistomail pseudonyms used by Harrison shows he also ran Bash-a-Business[.]com, which Harrison dedicated to “all those sorry ass corporate executives out there profiting from your hard work, organs, lives, ideas, intelligence, and wallets.” Copies of the site at archive.org show it was the work of someone calling themselves “The Chaos Creator.”

Will Harrison was terminated as an Ashley Madison employee in November 2011, and by early 2012 he’d turned his considerable harassment skills squarely against the company. Ashley Madison’s long-suspected army of fake female accounts came to the fore in August 2012 after the former sex worker turned activist and blogger Maggie McNeill published screenshots apparently taken from Ashley Madison’s internal systems suggesting that a large percentage of the female accounts on the service were computer-operated bots.

Ashley Madison’s executives understood that only a handful of employees at the time would have had access to the systems needed to produce the screenshots McNeill published online. In one exchange on Aug. 16, 2012, Ashley Madison’s director of IT was asked to produce a list of all company employees with all-powerful administrator access.

“Who or what is asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman asked, after being sent a list of nine email addresses.

“It appears to be the email address Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.

“And his access was never shut off until today?,” asked the company’s general counsel Mike Dacks.

What prompted the data scientist Bullock to reach out were gobs of anti-Semitic diatribes from Harrison, who had taken to labeling Biderman and others “greedy Jew bastards.”

“So good luck, I’m sure we’ll talk again soon, but for now, Ive got better things in the oven,” Harrison wrote to Biderman after his employment contract with Ashley Madison was terminated. “Just remember I outsmarted you last time and I will outsmart and out maneuver you this time too, by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”

Harrison signed his threatening missive with the salutation, “We are legion,” suggesting that whatever comeuppance he had in store for Ashley Madison would come from a variety of directions and anonymous hackers.

The leaked Biderman emails show that Harrison made good on his threats, and that in the months that followed Harrison began targeting Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives with menacing anonymous emails and spoofed phone calls laced with profanity and anti-Semitic language.

But on Mar. 5, 2014, Harrison committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. This fact was apparently unknown to Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives more than a year later when their July 2015 hack was first revealed.

Does Harrison’s untimely suicide rule him out as a suspect in the 2015 hack? Who is The Chaos Creator, and what else transpired between Harrison and Ashley Madison prior to his death? We’ll explore these questions in Part II of this story, to be published early next week.