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Reg readers select infosec A-Team to save Ashley Madison

Good news for the bad boy; bad news for the good girl...

It’s a week since – with some prescience – we launched a poll to find out who, in the wide world of IT and beyond, might be man (or woman) enough to rescue troubled infidelity site Ashley Madison.

Hours later self-styled “King of Infidelity” Noel Biderman quit as chief exec of Avid Life Media, the parent firm of Ashley Madison. We’re not claiming any credit. Our thoughts were initially spurred by noticing that ALM had weeks-old unfilled vacancies for a data analyst and a senior system administrator.

For the benefit of those returning from a month’s holiday in Outer Mongolia, all hell has broken loose since hackers raided affair-arranging site Ashley Madison website in July and then leaked databases containing 36 million accounts, plus source code and Biderman's company emails weeks later. Avid Life Media – which has pledged to continue running – faces class-action lawsuits as well as negative media coverage over suicides linked to the outing of its love-rat users.

To cap it all, security experts who have been through the leaked info have uncovered evidence that many of the female profiles were actually bots, an allegation strongly denied by Avid Life Media earlier this week.

Ashley Madison is in urgent need of a trouble-shooter, preferably someone with ninja like security skills matched with fearsome business acumen. Who would be up for the difficult, perhaps impossible, job of turning around the fortunes of the hacker-raided Tinder-for-cheaters site? We suggested some candidates and put it to the vote. Here are the results…

  1. John McAfee – 363 votes
  2. Someone with a TARDIS or a DeLorean – 269
  3. Chuck Norris – 226
  4. Infosec Taylor Swift – 84
  5. Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn from Hackers – 72

So there you have it. The wild man of IT is preferred over Marty McFly and even Chuck Norris to do for a website what Gordon Ramsey does for struggling lodging places in Hotel Hell. ®

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