Prepare to be Thunderstruck: What if 'deuszu' ISN'T the Ashley Madison hacker?

This article is really about ..

.. the perils of solely using meta-data to prove something. There is never certainty because you always deal with probabilities, not actual facts. And those facts could be wrong.

Not that that bothers law enforcement much, as far as I can tell.

"For all we know, Zu may be a dog on the internet."

No. Dogs are not allowed.

STR, win a beer.

Krebs was off his rocker to have said that.

He must have had a really bad virus at the time.

Surely a true hacker would've picked an AC/DC track with rock drumming god Phil Rudd playing on it, not the second-rate replacement they're currently using.

I'm still not convinced. There's plenty of other points that Krebs ignored.

What about the fact that earlier on Thadeus claimed (or rather, boasted) that he was behind the hack? Look at @deuszu tweets from August 23 about the Ashley Madison Sharp printer, for one example. He claims to have defaced it, and that "I still have control" (implying he/she is the original hacker).

Also, clearly Thadeus, @amlolzz, and am.peen.es are related. Whoever they are, they're certainly motivated to disseminate information from the leaked data (@amlolzz pored through 100,000 emails to prove Noel Bideeman had affairs and hired escorts). Doesn't make them guilty, but makes them noteworthy.

The $500,000 reward...

Is it an actual $500,000 reward or is it $20 for the reward and $480,000 notes that could be a reward if they ever come back to ALM?

Uh?

Trial by journalism is a rotten way of doing business. But I am confused about a factual statement in the article.

It says "The image below was grabbed on 4 August 2012". It is of a web browser showing a "replication server" page and with several other tabs. But if I follow the link to it on Krebs's site then I see a Twitter-generated page with "6:40 a.m. - 19 Jul 2015" written on it. The link on Krebs's page is https://twitter.com/deuszu/status/622763065746915329

I am obviously even more dim witted than normal, so can someone sit me down and gently explain the 4 August 2012 thing.

Nowhere in the article does he state he know who did it. Nowhere in the article does he place blame on Zu, It actually says "But one thing is clear: If Zu wasn’t involved in the hack, he almost certainly knows who was". That is no assigning blame.

When I first read Krebs story on this my immediate reaction was "That's pretty thin."

I understand some people really want to grab a bit of fame and the best way to do that is to "get in front of the story" so to speak. However Krebs got so far in front of this story I feel like he failed to notice the story took a left turn a mile back.

Even if it ultimately turns out to be Zu's work, I think Krebs should have looked for a bit more condemning evidence before naming someone. If I were Zu I'd hire legal to look into possible libel. Heck, I'd look into it even if I did do it just to throw people off track.

I think we can conclude the hacker was Angus

Zu may be a dog on the internet

So, good-looking and well-endowed as well?