Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, is offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the hacker or hackers responsiblefor the breach of its network.
The announcement was made by Bryce Evans, a Toronto police inspector in Canada. Ashley Madison is a Canadian-based company.
"Today I can confirm that Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and prosecution of the person or persons responsible for the Ashley Madison database leak," Mr Evans said, according to the BBC .
He also said that police have so far had two confirmed reports of suicides as a result of the data leaked by the hackers. The hackers made good on their threat last week, releasing sensitive customer data they had stolen a month earlier, which included about 36 million email addresses of customers on the website. The data also included the real names, addresses and phone numbers of people who paid for access to the site by credit card.
Mr. Evans also revealed an interesting detail about the hack. He noted that Ashley Madison employees first learned of the breach on July 12, when they logged into their computers and were presented with a message from the hackers. He did not say what the message said, but noted that it was accompanied by music, specifically AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”.
It's worth noting that this was the same music that accompanied a 2012 hack that affected computers at an Iranian nuclear facility. That doesn't mean, however, that the same hackers were behind both breaches. The ALM hackers could simply have copied the tactic.
In the hack against Iran, the attackers used a worm that affected computers at two facilities in Natanz and Fordo that were used to enrich uranium with hexafluoride gas.
