JMcA obviously!
Did you really need to ask?
Avid Life Media – the owner of hookup site Ashley Madison – has weeks-old openings for a data analyst and a senior system administrator. The opportunities (noticed by Vulture-eyed Reg staffers) got us thinking about who in the wide world of tech is capable of righting the hacker-raided Tinder-for-cheaters site, which has …
Well the thing is, normally I would pick Bruce Schneier as he's undoubtedly brilliant and one of the most respected security professionals in the business. But at this point it's gone beyond a security problem and become the sort of PR debacle that no inside-the-box thinking and seriousness can fix.
Meaning the only person on the list who I think would have a hope in Hell of pulling something out of this fire is McAfee who would shrug, make some jokes and handle the unprecedented amount of criticism and hate without at any point appearing ruffled.
(Rumpled maybe, however)
Bruce Schneier fact: if you need to hire him, you can't afford to. Because this is a man who can dehash your password from the "x" in /&c/password
without looking at /&c/shadow.
El Reg fact: I had to write "/&c/"
because, writing "/etc/"
before "passwd"
or "shadow"
triggers blocking from cloudfart.
"In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The A-Team."
Or the updated version, "The Government considers these people "irrelevant". We don't. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number's up... we'll find *you*"
(Speaking of which: why wasn't Root on the list?)
has all the "chops" to do the job, including the paranoia and morals; and just look at the people he surrounds himself with. Right out of Avid Media to begin with.
As someone mentioned before, a good cultural fit.
Hey, Bruce said it was an inside job. He just didn't say which kind.
Blow, Hand or Rim? Your choice!
>Tony Blair.
I think you've missed how the site operates. Unless you're gay or one of the presumably very busy one percenters, AM gets paid, you get... nothing.
Forget the privacy problem, until that news came out, AM still had a chance, because fools and their money are always easily parted.
Now though, AM, through its adverts, have climbed the Tower of Wrongness to the height of the top floor of Irony and are about to leap off into depths of the Custard Pie of Laughing Stock. If you want to play doctors and nurses and resuscitate them, you will need the services of one Dr Frankenstein. This one, however, I suspect is going to be reported as "missing presumed dead - last seen drifting off in icy waters, alone, wearing nothing but custard, with a lawsuit sticking out of its chest."
When something is this badly f***ed it can only be Chuck Norris. JMcA would be better suited to helping with an exit strategy for the ALM execs, get them dressed up as Guatemalan street sellers or drunk German tourists so they can relocate to the jungles of Belize.
you don't need a big name to make this better, you just need a big budget. Hire a fair to middling CIO who wants to make a name for him/herself and give them a massive budget to hire competent techies and buy best of market security products. Nothing in this hack was clever, it was a failure of these basic systems. In addition if you hire good security people* and pay them well you will increase the mean salary and so attract more good people to the market.
*I mean people who install and manage security, not the box ticking fucktards in security compliance. Need good ones of those too but they are best recruited from technical teams rather than the snake oil stands that seem to be the source of all candidates at the moment.