Activists have hacked Parler alternative, Gab. An estimated 15,000 users have been compromised and 70GB of data have been taken.
On Saturday, we reported that the FBI director has been pushing for a renewed war on encryption. As a result, we could be headed for having a 4th prediction come true. The director cited efforts by right wing extremists to be more encrypted. The feeling is that right wing terrorists might be too secure to keep track of.
Now, we are learning that the opposite might be true. After Parler went down following Amazon’s decision to disable AWS services for the platform, Trump supporters scattered to alternative platforms. One such alternative is Gab, another well known right wing echo chamber.
As it turns out, if the hope for Trump supporters is that Gab would be a secure place to plot further attacks, those thoughts were very wrong. News has surfaced that says that Gab has been hacked and data both public and private of 15,000 users made its way into the hands of those who carried out the attack. From Techspot:
After Parler was shut down, many of its users flocked to a similar platform called Gab, which was recently hacked. The treasure trove includes both public and private data on 15,000 Gab users, which will provide journalists and researchers with an important sociological resource.
Two months later, a similar thing is happening to a different digital refuge called Gab, which is where many of Parler’s users migrated after Parler was shut down. According to Wired, a hacker embarked on a quest to expose Gab’s patrons and was able to extract data out of backend databases using a SQL injection vulnerability.
There are no images or videos, but this is still an extensive data breach that reportedly includes the accounts of prominent personalities such as former President Donald Trump, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Infowars host Alex Jones. The company, however, denies that it suffered a data breach and assured Gab users that their passwords have not been revealed.
Anti-secrecy activist group DDoSecrets has compiled the data into something it calls GabLeaks, with the intention of providing it to select journalists, social scientists, and researchers for further analysis. This prompted a response from Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who described the hacktivists as “mentally ill” demons. He also noted “reporters, who write for a publication that has written many hit pieces on Gab in the past, are in direct contact with the hacker and are essentially assisting the hacker in his efforts to smear our business and hurt you, our users.”
This very likely represents a major blow to Gab. It has the chance to capitalize on Parler’s downtime. When this happened, it very likely represented a missed opportunity to take in as many Parler refugees as possible. With Parler now being back online reportedly being run on “independent technology”, extremists now have both a push reason (the Gab hack) and a pull reason (Parler is back online) to return to Parler.
What’s more is that this development also represents another blow to the argument that right wing extremists have gotten too secure in their communications. If these sites are publicly known to have weaknesses in their security, then who knows what is being kept in secret in the background?
Either way you look at this, this is also a blow to those who are trying to plot terrorists attacks against America. It’s kind of hard to feel sorry for them given what they represent these days.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
