Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Friday, February 04 2011 @ 09:00 am
Last modified on
The man who, according to PlentyOfFish founder and CEO Marcus Frind, hacked the popular dating site has now released his side of the story in an interview with Grumo Media[*1] . The audio of the interview can be found here[*2] .
Frind claims that Russo hacked the site, downloaded users' email addresses and passwords, and harassed his wife. Russo, on the other hand, says that he was just trying to help PlentyOfFish close a gaping hole in their security.
"I'm a security researcher from Buenos Aires, Argentina," wrote Russo, in a document explaining the event from his point of view. "The Last Friday 21 of Januray, we discovered a vulnerability in www.plentyoffish.com exposing users details, including usernames, addresses, phone numbers, real names, email addresses, passwords in plain text, and in most of cases, paypal accounts, of more than 28,000,000 (twenty eight million users). [sic]" According to Russo, he notified both Frind and his wife, Annie Kanciar, of the vulnerability in order to prevent any damage from being done. He claims that all potential problems were rectified without exposing any confidential user information, and that the PlentyOfFish security team remained in contact with him because they were interested in hiring his team as additional security professionals.
Then things took a negative turn. "While we were creating the legal documents in order to proceed," Russo said, "Markus Frind got progressively more aggressive and unresponsive with us, and told us to speak with their employees, Kate and Jay, because there was a serial killer, murdering people from the website." On the evening of January 30th, Frind sent Russo an email accusing him of hacking the site and stealing members' personal information. The email reads as follows:
"If this data goes public I am going to email every single effected user on Plentyoffish your phone number, email address and picture. And tell them you hacked into their accounts.
Then i'm going to sue you In Canada, US and UK and argintina. I am going to completely destroy your life, no one is ever going to hire you for anything again, this isn't piratebay and we definately aren't fooling around.
Markus."
Russo also released the text of several emails sent back and forth between him and Kate Bilenki, a PlentyOfFish employee, that seemingly prove that he was working with the site (presumably to help close any gaps in their security).
Frind has yet to respond to Russo's accusations.
Stay tuned for further updates on the developing story.