And we expected ...
him to admit it :-)
Ex-Tory bigwig Damian Green has got caught up in the hack of AshleyMadison.com after it emerged a private email address seemingly linked to him was found on the site for love rats. The former Minister for Police and Criminal Justice has denied ever using the website, and said he could not remember if the aol.com address used …
Taking the time to research his mothers maiden name shows impressive attention to detail from the person(s) unknown trying to frame him by signing him up to an infidelity-based dating site then hoping their database gets leaked in order to embarass him. Which is obviously what has happened.
hackers, usually make money out of purveying porn on their websites, use fake accounts a lot and refuse to reveal who they really are on-line but get all sanctimonious & holier than thou over the silly Ashley Madison site & the fools who use it
pot kettles & black are words that spring to mind
also don't hackers sites usually contain adverts for fake dating agencies, the 'meet sexy girls from Russia' type or 'hot girls from your area'. From what I can make out Ashley Madison was marginally more upmarket. A cynic might conclude they're just trying to trash the opposition to the stuff they advertise
... but does the system send emails automatically for contact requests or other messages exchanges? Who would risk to send them to other people addresses, risking to expose their activities, especially to some who could easily trigger a full investigation, unless explicitly trying to embarrass the recipient?
Or AM hoped to make some easy money from cancellations by people too afraid to make it public?
The other MP account exposed so far was a very obvious fake, with most of the details being wrong, so it wouldn't be a shock if this turned out to be junk too. Someone said a certain Mr B Obama has a whopping seven accounts on there too!
Meanwhile, I read somewhere else that a married convicted child molester had two AM accounts (active, paid up ones, not just unverified registrations like this one) on the go at once. I suppose if you can put up with the child molester bit, tolerating a bit of adultery as well isn't such a big deal, but still...
I wouldn't be surprised if half of the mugs who signed up for this were "just curious" and might have bottled out of it if any serious opportunity arose.
Then I'd guess some of the men who signed up were attempting to "get even" with wives they (probably wrongly) suspect of cheating but couldn't face challenging them. The assumption being it's easier for a wife to find someone to cheat with without having to resort to looking online.
Finally there's the conspiratorial view that the website was operated on behalf of persons who might use it to blackmail prominent people and generally corrupt society....
According to bloggers who'd researched the site before this snafu a lot of people on the site where just looking for like minded people to chat to.
I've not been near this one, but have frequented swapping sites and user generated content sites without any interest in joining in. Found lots of people to chat to over the years. Lets face it who talks about the intimate life whether it rocks or sucks (or doesn't) with friends. If you need someone to talk to you either pay an shrink/councillor or you find someone anonymously.
"Ashley Madison does not require users to verify their email addressees"
If that's so then I hope they don't bother sending anything to the addresses of people signing up - because signing up with someone else's address would be an obvious way to be an annoying bastard.
And assuming they don't, if the address is neither verified nor used, why do they ask for it in the first place?
As I mentioned in a previous AM thread, someone recently signed up for a match.com account using my email address. As far as I could tell it was a legitimate mistake, but my attempts to unsubscribe using the link in the messages had little if any effect. So yeah, it was an easy way to be an annoying bastard.
Though in this case I feel kind of bad for him. I finally had to access the account using password reset and close it down. Somewhere a middle aged divorced guy with two kids and the same first initial and last name as me is wondering why his dating site account doesn't work anymore.
Which therefore leads to the obvious question: Why the hell aren't these sites verifying addresses? It's not difficult to do, and not doing it in this day and age is demonstrating a level of twattery that goes way beyond just being twats and into the realms of being twats*10twat.
Of course he's lying, he's a politician.
Let see, he created the account changing his year of birth and his correct mother's maiden name
or
Hackers knew that this information would be leaked and set the account up in advance so it could be found at a later date and discredit a "Former" Minister for the Police and current back bench M.P. inflicting no damage whatsoever on his party,
I know which I believe.
Since he arranged for it to deleted under "exceptional" circumstances (read one rule for them and another for the plebs):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6056725/Tory-MP-Damian-Green-has-DNA-profile-deleted-from-database.html
On the assumption this database is effectively stolen intellectual property belonging to AM, isn't reporting on and revealing the contents of it on shaky legal ground? Surely it would be akin to someone thieving source code, putting it on a torrent, then people reporting on and revealing the contents?
Genuine question.
"Stolen" means taken without the intention to return, and "intellectual property" means all sorts of very different things: trademarks, patents, ... I'm not sure what the expression "stolen intellectual property" is supposed to mean. Something like a hijacked domain name, perhaps? In this case I don't think AM's possible copyright or rights under the European Database Directive are something people need to worry about very much in comparison to the potential problems of handling "sensitive personal data".
I was curious , so I had a look myself. I have never signed up to AM , but one of my "use for spam" addresses appears in the list of email addresses. I've not looked back through all the junk mail to see if it ever had anything in there from AM. This makes me doubtful that any of the "famous people" are actually real!
Jc