Removing stolen information via DMCA takedown requests huh? I bet the NSA wishes they’d thought of that one a couple years ago.

1). insider, or former insider, seeking vengeance.
2). angry, vindictive, cheated upon female with mad h@xor skillz. (that may be sexist, but, according today’s AMA by a former Avid Life Media employee, it was only angry females who contacted them or showed up at the, guarded, front door in Toronto.
3). moralizing religious hacktivist.
4). opportunistic hacker doing it for the Lulz.

“Avid Life Media runs Ashley Madison, the internet’s #1 cheating site, for people who are married or in a relationship to have an affair. ALM also runs Established Men, a prostitution/human trafficking website for rich men to pay for sex, as well as cougar life, a dating website for cougars, man crunch, a site for gay dating, swappernet for swingers, and the big and the beautiful, for overweight dating.”

The moralizing, as evidenced in their statement (http://pastebin.com/Kty5xBiv), seems inconsistent. Their main goal is shutting down both the Ashley Madison and Established Men websites. However, they also publish the usertable for Swappernet with the rationale that this was the only site with cleartext passwords contained in the database. So, they are going after swingers, but only partially, and leaving the gay folk alone. The Ashley Madison site also requires females to sign up for this to work at all. The male/female ratio is heavily skewed towards males, especially after deleting the constant influx of bogus female accounts meant to drive traffic to webcam girls. However, that still means there are real females on the site looking for a very discreet affair. One would assume they are cheaters also. Yet, their statement contains this sentence:

“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion.”

What about the cheating dirtbags who are females? That may point to an angry, vindictive female hacker but I am confused by their strategy. They didn’t dump the entire Ashley Madison database. They didn’t even just dump only the males on that database. They are releasing the details on one account per day until both the Ashley Madison and Established Men sites are shut down. I would think that releasing the data all at once would effectively shut down those websites without the power trip game/drama. This is the main reason I am leaning towards a vengeful insider as the culprit. Their statement includes stuff that appears to be personal:

“Well Trevor [ALM’s CTO], welcome to your worst fucking nightmare.”

“And it was easy. For a company whose main promise is secrecy, it’s like you didn’t even try, like you thought you had never pissed anyone off”

Yet, there is the following statement as well.

“Our one apology is to Mark Steele (Director of Security). You did everything you could, but nothing you could have done could have stopped this.”

The tone, and inconsistency, of those two statements reeks of anger and bragging. It certainly does not fit a purely moralizing hacktivist.

Finally, the name “Impact Team” was probably inspired by the recent “Hacking Team” exploits. I can’t help but notice though that the acronym is “IT”. If, in fact, a former member of ALM’s IT department is seeking revenge than ALM probably already has a good idea who it is. Although, like most companies, they will attempt to keep all details secret while reassuring their paid subscribers that everything will soon be OK.