Former President Donald Trump’s Gab account information was among the 15,000 accounts that were recently hacked, says the founder of the far-right social platform.
The Gab leaks announcement came from founder Andrew Torba, who confirmed what WikiLeaks had claimed about receiving 70GB of data.
More details from a recent ArsTechnica post:
Gab and a competing site called Parler were some of the last refuges that allowed much of the content to remain publicly available.
Shortly before the shuttering, however, somebody found a way to use Parler’s publicly available programming interfaces to scrape about 99 percent of the user content from the site and subsequently make it publicly available.
DDoSecrets said that the 70GB GabLeaks contains over 70,000 plaintext messages in more than 19,000 chats by over 15,000 users. The dump also shows passwords that are “hashed,” a cryptographic process that converts plaintext into unintelligible characters. While hashes can’t be converted back into plaintext, cracking them can be trivial when websites choose weak hashing schemes.
Gab has long been criticized as a haven for hate speech. In 2018, Google banned the Gab app from its Play Store for terms of service violations. A year later, web host GoDaddy terminated service to Gab after one of its users took to the site to criticize the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society shortly before killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
If only Donald Trump had done what his opponent Joe Biden did just days after landing in the White House — that is, put out a national call for IT experts to help secure the White House’s website.
Read Next: Intel RealSense ID is a Mobile Facial Recognition System
It is clear after Gab leaks that politicians, as well as potential purveyors of hate speech, will need to be more wise about which platforms they take part in and how they secure their activities on those platforms going forward.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply