Is this the Ashley Madison hacker?

A top security researcher has potentially unmasked the hacker, as it’s revealed how many women used the website.

Security researcher Brian Krebs claims to be onto the trail of the hacker, who self-identifies online as Thadeus Zu.

Fallout from the massive Ashley Madison hack is continuing, with new revelations that the hacker has been potentially identified and is actively tweeting about the attack.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, security researcher Brian Krebs claims to be onto the trail of the hacker, who self-identifies online as Thadeus Zu, and could possibly be Australian.

At a press conference this week Toronto police said Ashley Madison employees first learned of the hack on July 12, when their office computers displayed a message from hackers and played “Thunderstruck.”

Mr Krebs said he has since found repeated references to AC/DC and the song in the Twitter feed of Thadeus Zu, who also appears to have intimate knowledge of the hack.

In one screen shot posted to the feed, the user appears to be listening to the song on YouTube as he prepares a “replica server so we can get that show started.”

On August 18, Wired magazine published a new link from the Ashley Madison hackers to files that listed individual users. But the Thadeus Zu account appeared to have access to the files the previous day.

“Time’s up,” the account tweeted on August 17, including a link to the hackers’ website announcing the data dump. About 10 minutes later, the account tweeted, “There is already one around sharing the link. We will wait it out for another 15 or 30 minutes before we share the link.”

Since then, the operator of the account appears to have been obsessed with news coverage of the Ashley Madison hack. He also refers to the Impact Team, the group claiming credit for the breach, and little-known details, including the password used in a 2012 hack of the Ashley Madison site.

The Thadeus Zu account, which follows The Australian on Twitter, follows 35 Twitter accounts, most of which are Australian news organisations.

According to Mr Krebs, the purported hacker makes constant references to his “Oz girl”, uses the greeting “cheers” and even talks about people visiting him in Australia.

Mr Krebs and others have been unable to contact the account operator.

Meanwhile it’s been revealed that almost none of the site’s members were women.

Gizmodo journalist Annalee Newlitz analysed the database and found that only 1,492 of women members on the database had ever checked their messages on the site, compared with more than 20 million men.

She also found only 2,409 of the women had ever used the site’s chat function, versus more than 11 million men, while only 9,700 women had ever responded to a message from another person on the site, compared with almost 6 million men.

And in a further development, Reuters is reporting that before the data leak a television show based on the adultery website was being shopped around Hollywood.

The series, to be called ‘Thank You Ashley Madison’, would focus on a divorced woman “who has a different vision for what marriage might look like in modern day,” according to OutEast Entertainment executive Courtney Hazlett.

“There’s a number of women in this position too, it’s not all about men, it’s a turning point in marriage,” she said.

Since last week’s hack, Hazlett said there’s been more interest in the project.

“When we started shopping this around, the first comment we were getting was ‘are you kidding me? That many people are using site?” But it’s definitely now not that,” she said.

Ashley Madison, the website for “married men and women” to pursue affairs and cheat on their spouse, was hacked last month by a group identifying itself as ­Impact Team.

The hackers gained access to personal data of millions of previously anonymous users, threatening to release it all unless parent company Avid Life Media took down the site and its sister enterprise Established Men.

Those sites remained active and Impact Team came good on its threat, releasing the information to the dark web, accessible only through special anonymous browsing software.

With The Wall Street Journal.