John McAfee: Ashley Madison database stolen by lone female employee | Hacker News Reader

John McAfee: Ashley Madison database stolen by lone female employee

ibtimes.co.uk

16 pointsbbx12 comments

Our industry is already so awful for women. Now, based on no evidence at all, McAfeee is singling out the only woman who worked there. His evidence is that every American English speaker knows only a woman would call men "scumbags." There's no other way to put it than to say this is false.

He also says that getting source code is hard, and that stock options data would only be accessible to an insider because it would only be on two desktops. The whole piece has so many guesses and assumptions, it is just depressing they're being used to target the lone woman.

Pure clickbait, he doesn't know anything.

"For example: the personnel work scheduling for equipment maintenance will normally exist only on the workstation of the maintenance manager."

Or on a shared drive if that's where IT have set up documents to be saved to by default. And access to the shared drive could be obtained by an IT administrator who has access to a shared drive, or an outsider who has compromised the system or an IT administrator's machine.

That said, the other claims like "...and specifically names employees that are liked and are doing a good job" I have no idea about.

Based on what we've got, it does look like we're looking at either an inside job or some really stupid internal IT policies.

Whoever did this had root. While it's obvious that internal information security is lax there, the reality is that it's a lot easier to get root by getting hired as the IT administrator and being given root as a part of your job. That's the ultimate social engineering stunt. There won't be any penetration logs, simply because the computer system wasn't hacked.

The valentine's day part of the analysis may have some merit, other than that, its one man's speculation (informed or otherwise).

Warning, autoplaying video.

I have also practiced social engineering since the word was first invented and I can very quickly identify gender if given enough emotionally charged words from an individual.

So really it is just a hunch. I find it is generally pretty dangerous to buy that much into your own bullshit.

edited to add -

The most telling was a statement calling men "scumbags" (for those readers that don't speak American/Canadian English, this is a word that only a woman would ever use to describe men).

Arctic Monkeys - When The Sun Goes Down - Alex Turner

And I've seen him with girls of the night, He told Roxanne to put on her red light, They're all infected but he'll be alright, Cause he's a scumbag, don't you know, I said he's a scumbag, don't you know!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUatH8zI6Qc

In a separate section, the perpetrator describes men as cheating dirtbags. I think in any language this would suggest that a woman is speaking.

Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag - Brendan B. Brown

I don't really need to quote any lyrics for this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3y9llDXuM

> So really it is just a hunch.

No, sir. John got it all figured out.

> Today, I can confidently claim that the single person is a woman

Why does gender of employee mater?

It's one of two pieces of information he is claiming to have have learned. It's relevant as it narrows down the list of suspects somewhat.

Men and women generally have different mating strategies so I guess the suggestion it's a woman could help explain motive. At the very least it's another (hypothesised) datapoint about the perpetrator. Why shouldn't it matter?

If McAfee is correct in his analysis, it matters because it could help narrow down who did it.

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