Hacker over a screen with binary code. (Shutterstock)
The social-media network Gab -- the most recent refuge for conservative and alt-right extremists -- has been victimized by a massive hack, including private data, Wired.com has reported.
The transparency group DDoSecrets says it will make the 70 GB of passwords, private posts, and more available to researchers, journalists, and social scientists, according to Wired.
"The incident comes weeks after far-right platform Parler was hacked just prior to being knocked offline," reports Wired.
"When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn't moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler's displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications."
The Wired story, which comes just days after Gab officials denied the existence of the hack to Wired writer Andy Greenberg, reports:
"Among the users whose hashed passwords appeared to be included in the data were those for Donald Trump, Republican congresswoman and QAnon-conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO and election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, and disinformation-spouting radio host Alex Jones."
The hack was huge:
"On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts," Wired reports. "DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill."
As the Verge reports, the folks at Gab were not pleased.
"Right-wing social media website Gab has reportedly been hacked, and CEO Andrew Torba said on Twitter that "demon hackers" were to blame, using a transphobic slur to describe them."
You can read the entire Wired report here.
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