{"id":200576,"date":"2021-02-28T20:16:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T01:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/02\/28\/ha-ha-14\/"},"modified":"2021-02-28T20:16:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T01:16:00","slug":"ha-ha-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/02\/28\/ha-ha-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Ha Ha!"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Right wing hate site Gab just got hacked<\/a>, big time. <\/p>\n

DDOSecrets, who previously had leaked racist and Islamophobic police training materials<\/a> got almost everything, public posts, private posts, user info, passwords, etc. <\/p>\n

These guys really do have spectacularly poor IT skills don’t they? <\/p>\n

It’s the revenge of Bobby Droptables<\/a> all over again <\/p>\n

On the bright side, it save lots of aviation fuel.<\/p>\n

Black helicopters are notorious fuel guzzlers: <\/p>\n

When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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\u2014including what appears to be passwords and private communications.<\/p>\n

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. 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.<\/p>\n

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles\u2014with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site\u2014but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. “It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”<\/p>\n

DDoSecrets says it’s not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users’ individual and group profiles\u2014their descriptions and privacy settings\u2014public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

<\/a>According to DDoSecrets’ Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab’s data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the site\u2014a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn’t differentiate between a user’s input and commands in the site’s code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker’s reference to an “Anonymous Revival Project,” they’re not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do “want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s reassuring that all the Nazis so far seem to be Colonel Klink, but we cannot rely on that forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Right wing hate site Gab just got hacked, big time. DDOSecrets, who previously had leaked racist and Islamophobic police training materials got almost everything, public posts, private posts, user info, passwords, etc. These guys really do have spectacularly poor IT skills don’t they? It’s the revenge of Bobby Droptables all over again On the bright …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1060,1292,997,1019],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer","category-hacking","category-internet","category-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}