CSEE faculty comment on Ashley Madison data breach

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 11:30:00 -0400
cybersecurity, faculty-and-staff, news

CSEE faculty Anupam Joshi and Rick Forno were interviewed this week by several media outlets on the impact and cybersecurity aspects of the Ashley Madison data breach.

Ashley Madison is a popular website with “more than 33 million members in 46 countries” that provides services “for married men and women looking to have a discreet affair.” Last month a group claimed to have obtained data about the site’s users and threatened to release it unless the site’s Toronto-based company, Avid Life Media Inc., shut down the service. Earlier in the spring, the company had announced plans for an IPO later in the year. The company called the hacker’s bluff and the group, the Impact Team, released more than 30G of customer data in several dumps this week. Avid Life has confirmed that some of the customer data posted is legitimate.

Professor Joshi, director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and also chair of the CSEE department, was interviewed by ABC2. In the interview, he cautioned that data breaches are increasingly becoming part of daily life. “Information is valuable,” he said. “People are after information. No security is perfect and once you marry these things, there is an incentive for someone to spend the right time and effort to steal some information.” He also spoke about users falling into a false sense of security. “Nothing is really secure on the Internet,” he warned. “If you don’t want the thing you’re doing to show up on ABC2 at some point then don’t do it.”

Dr. Forno, Center for Cybersecurity assistant director and head of UMBC Cybersecurity Graduate Program spoke to Beta Boston and TV Newsroom about public reactions as the data breach revealed several government officials as users of the website. “Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get two wildly different opinions on the issue,” he said. “Some people will say, `Well, they broke the law, they hacked into this private company’s computers and stole data.’ Yeah, that’s true. But from the other side, you have to say, were they doing this for a public service?” He also discussed the incident with South Korea-based radio program “This Morning with Alex Jensen.”

Some material adapted from an Insights article by Achsah Callahan.