 Hacked online cheating service AshleyMadison.com is portraying itself as a victim of malicious cybercriminals, but leaked emails from the company’s CEO suggest that AshleyMadison’s top leadership hacked into a competing dating service in 2012. “They did a very lousy job building their platform. He noted in the email that he had posted a sample of the stolen database to a GitHub account and included a link to the GitHub site, although that post is no longer available online. "Also, I can turn any non paying user into a paying user, vice versa, compose messages between users, check unread stats, etc.” 
 
 Bhatia had been the founding CTO of Avid Life Media, but was no longer associated with the company at the time he sent the email to Biderman and Jiwan. At the time, Bhatia was downplaying the leak, saying that his team of investigators had found no signs that the dump of data was legitimate, and that it looked like a number of fake data dumps the company had seen in the weeks prior. More than six months after Bhatia came to Biderman with revelations of the nerve.com security vulnerabilities, Biderman was set to meet with several representatives of the company. Biderman sent Bhatia a separate email asking, “Should I tell them of their security hole?” 
 
 Mills, the former CEO of Nerve.com, did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. As bad as this breach has been for AshleyMadison and its millions of users, it’s likely nowhere near over: Hackers who have been combing through the company’s leaked email records have just released a “selected dox” archive — a collection of documents, images and other data from Biderman’s inbox, including a 100-page movie script co-written by Biderman called “In Bed With Ashley Madison.” Also included in the archive are dozens of other sensitive documents, including a scan of the CEO’s drivers license, copies of personal checks, bank account numbers, home address, and his income statements for the last four years. I got their entire user base,” Raja Bhatia wrote Noel Biderman, CEO of Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison’s parent company, and Rizwan Jiwan, the company's chief operating officer.
– "They did a very lousy job building their platform," former Ashley Madison chief technology officer Raja Bhatia allegedly wrote to CEO Noel Biderman in 2012. "I got their entire user base." Ironically—considering Ashley Madison is now dealing with its own stolen data being leaked by hackers—Bhatia was referring to a competitor site he allegedly hacked back in 2012, Krebs on Security reports. According to Biderman's leaked emails, Bhatia figured out how to download the user database of Nerve.com (which was starting its own dating site) and manipulate it in ways including changing non-paying users to paying users, sending messages from one user to another, and more. Krebs on Security reports that, per the leaked emails, Bhatia's hack came months after Nerve approached Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison's parent company, about a partnership. In fact, Bhatia offered $20 million to buy Nerve and another site, but Avid Life Media decided not to go through with the deal. Wired reports Bhatia was no longer working for Ashley Madison when he discovered Nerve's security problems, but additional leaked emails show he was also aware of similar security issues within Ashley Madison. Last week's release of stolen Ashley Madison data has already resulted in reports of online blackmailing and possibly two suicides, and more leaks may be on their way.