Peter Schorsch
Oh, to be state Rep. Ritch Workman.
First, the powerful chairman of the Florida House Rules Committee last week was revealed to be a driver-partner for ride-sharing app Uber.
“I always feel I have wasted time up here at night,” Workman told Marc Caputo of POLITICO. “At home, I have my wife, my kids, my ranch, my animals and my real job to occupy that free space. So when I’m not in the Capitol or my office or in the chamber or having dinner with a group, this is what I like to do.”
Well, it turns out Workman (allegedly) has other hobbies, too.
The Melbourne Republican’s name can be found in the data dump involving subscribers to AshleyMadison.com, the popular website for married people looking for affairs.
On Tuesday, hackers who call themselves the Impact Team posted a 10-gigabyte file purporting to be from AshleyMadison.com.
Analysis of the email addresses in the databases show that most come from webmail providers, said Robert Hansen, vice president of WhiteHat Labs at the computer security company WhiteHat Security, which independently studied the data.
The information available for each user was extensive.
“It’s everything from their name, age, interests, whether they smoke or drink, down to very detailed sexual fantasies, what they enjoy having done to them and what they want to do to others,” said Adam McNeil, a malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes Labs, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based computer security firm, who has inspected the database.
Data guru Matt Florell of St. Pete Polls tipped Florida Politics that Workman’s name is in the files.
Florell explained how he found this needle in a haystack.
“I started with the transactional data,” Florell said. “This is the people that actually paid for services through AshleyMadison.com or their sister websites, not just free and unverified accounts.”
Continues Florell, “Then I took the list of candidates running for state office and ran it against the list of over 46,000 people in Florida that were paid customers. There were a dozen matches, but it was mostly what you expect, “Mike Miller,” “David Smith,” “Mark Jones,” and lots of other common names.
That’s when Florell noticed what he described as a familiar and oddly spelled name that has recently been in the news: “Ritch Workman.”
Florell says he drilled down into the records and the data he found matched Workman’s former house in Melbourne when using his full name of “David Richard Workman.” The data also included a matching birth date, 1973-05-03.
In his profile, Workman described himself as “I’m single, but need DISCREET.”
Workman made only one payment of $49 in January 2012 to AshleyMadison.com.
Direct messages to Workman have gone unreturned.
In a 2011 Huffington Post profile, Workman said he favors legalizing adultery among heterosexual couples.
Below is a screenshot of Workman’s data on AshleyMadison.com.
Material from the USA TODAY was used in this post.
