After information on his 30 million members was compromised, Plenty of Fish CEO Markus Frind did what any sensible tech executive who cares about his reputation would do: complain to the mum of the youngster who hacked him.
In a long post on his pesonal blog, the dating site CEO accused a hacker from Argentina named Chris Russo of trying to extort him via a trove of tens of millions of member email address, passwords and names. Russo, in turn, insisted that the hack was actually done by other people, from Russia. Frind didn’t buy that, since Russo recently made his name hacking into the file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Frind:
[Russo said his group was]a security company. In exchange for complete access to all of our source code and SQL servers they can make sure we aren’t attacked again… They also claim they know the locations of where the Russians dumped our data and they can delete it… I just get pissed off and start explaining how I’m going to sue them out of existence if the data comes out… they have absolutely no idea what they are doing. At this point I did the only logical thing; I emailed his mother.
Russo, who gives his side of things here, says he was merely trying to report a security problem when Frind came unhinged. He also shares an email from a Plenty of Fish employee who seems eager to receive his bid to offer security consulting: “Hi Chris! Just thought I’d follow up on the proposal we discussed, please let me know if you’re still sending it :-)”
The 23-year-old has not, however, yet offered any information on whether he’s in big trouble with mum. It’s hard to blame Frind for trying, though. Security breaches are emotionally fraught events!
[Image via Shutterstock]
Republished from Gawker