By Ben Suroeste
TORONTO – Valuable Incriminating Information Corp. Chief Executive Officer Nicholas St. Croix said he’s “shocked, mystified, befuddled and flabbergasted” by the recent hacking of his company’s flagship website, Ponzi Madoff. The cyber-attack netted the intruders millions of credit card numbers, email addresses and other sensitive customer data.
Known for a controversial business model that encourages people to engage in various forms of unethical behavior, the Ponzi Madoff main page sports the marketing phrase “Fuck other people. Do what you want.”
Last week, a hacktivist group calling itself “Irony Force” posted a massive dump of user data from the site’s subscriber database. The information included real names, credit card numbers, email addresses, contents of messages users sent through the site, photographs and other user-posted, personally identifiable information.
“This site and everybody who uses it is disgusting, vile, dishonest and contemptible,” Irony Force noted in a statement accompanying the data dump. “Using the internet to engage in behavior that is dishonest, fraudulent and unethical is almost as bad as using the internet to publish sensitive personal information, commit acts of extortion or intimidate people into doing what you want.
“Accordingly, if VII Corp. doesn’t completely remove from the internet all traces of Ponzi Madoff and their other site, Enron Tyco, Irony Force will release even more user data, including the residential addresses of anyone who looks particularly frail and ill-equipped to defend himself or herself,” the statement continued. “The remaining VII site, CougarGrep, which specializes in hooking up sexually aggressive older women with socially inept younger male computer geeks, can stay.”
St. Croix said whatever users might think about his company or its websites, Irony Force’s actions are “criminal, reprehensible, and most important, not directly profitable in any way I can discern.”
“I know a lot of people don’t approve of giving aspiring confidence men and curious potential co-conspirators a forum to exchange ideas, express their harmless grifting fantasies and store sensitive, incriminating information pertaining to prior financial misdeeds,” St. Croix said. “But I don’t get the angle here. How is Irony Force going to make money off this? I mean, I totally get doing things that are brutally unethical or facilitating such when there’s a buck in doing so, but unless there’s something I’m missing, these hackers’ unauthorized access of our network wasn’t just criminal and reckless, but pointlessly unprofitable, as well.”
According to Irony Force, one of the main reasons for the hack was Ponzi Madoff’s “manifest and ongoing dishonesty” toward their customers concerning a feature of the site called “Deny ‘Til You Die.”
“Ponzi Madoff made it sound like if you gave them $20 bucks, they’d erase any trace of your past use of the site,” according to the Irony Force statement. “But we have it on good authority from a good friend of ours that old posts hypothesizing about the potential efficacy of bringing the old ‘False Good Samaritan’ routine into a revenge-porn context are still visible if you’re logged in as any user with whom our friend exchanged direct messages and/or ‘Con Nods.’”
The Ponzi Madoff hack was reported first by the security firm KrapsonSecurity in a blog post late last week.
“If you think about it, the kind of information that was being exchanged by Ponzi Madoff is pretty obviously a desirable target for hackers and cybercriminals,” said Brent Krapson, the firm’s founder. “Actually, even if you don’t think about it, that data is still pretty obviously a desirable target. Seriously, were their members all mentally deficient, or something? What the fuck were they thinking posting stuff like that on the internet, for Christ’s sake? Not only that, but these dipshits actually paid — with fucking credit cards, no less — for the distinct honor of helping to create a hacker’s treasure trove out of their own shit. Genius, right?”
Meanwhile, St. Croix said VII has “fully addressed, rectified, mitigated and fixed-up” the security vulnerability exploited by Irony Force.
“The security and privacy of our members is our highest priority,” St. Croix said. “We worked hard to make the names Ponzi Madoff and Enron Tyco brands users can trust, places where they know they can lie, cheat and dissemble in the privacy and safety of their own home, with no fear of being exposed as the fickle, self-centered cyber-charlatans they are.
“This is why we won’t rest until the members of Irony Force, whoever they might be, are brought to justice to answer for their crimes — crimes for which I can think of no reasonable, revenue-generating rationalization,” St. Croix added. “Seriously, they aren’t asking for money? What kind of self-respecting criminal extorts for the purpose of gaining something other than cash? It’s simply unconscionable.”
