Ashley Madison Investigation Suggests The Hacker Might Be Australian

Until today, precious few strides had been made in revealing the identities behind The Impact Team – a hacking group allegedly responsible for the crippling Ashley Madison security breach, leaking millions of users’ data online. 

Researchers from krebsonsecurity.com have today published an investigative report on the hack’s most-convincing suspect to date: an elusive, could-be Australian known online as ‘Thadeus Zu‘ (or @deuszu) is suspected by Brian Krebs to be involved in the security breach.

According to Krebs, a link to the same cache of data originally shared by the Impact Team themselves—at the time, no media sources had been privy to the leak—tweeted by Zu was the first red flag. 

Evidence escalated from there. Avid Life Media, the parent group of Ashley Madison, reportedly received threatening messages on their computer about the hack, before it was widely released – accompanied by an AC/DC soundtrack.

That ‘strayan m/ link is, naturally, too tenuous to say anything about the location and/or nationality of the hacker; but a slew of clues mined from his bottomless pit of tweets hinting at Thadeus Zu’s whereabouts, connections to Australian celebrities and links to the Impact Team make for a convincing li’l conspiracy theory indeed. Even if @deuszu isn’t buying it.


Krebs’ fascinating investigation has since been republished by Fairfax; whether Thadeus Zu, whoever that really is, actually happens to be involved in the hack or not remains to be seen. But it’s pretty huge, if true.

Read Brian Krebs’ detailed investigation into Thadeus Zu and the Ashley Madison hack over here

via KrebsOnSecurity.

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