The far-right hate platform Gab has been hacked and 70GB of private posts and other data are being made available to journalists and social scientists, says Distributed Denial of Secrets cofounder Emma Best.
From Wired:
"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."
When Wired asked Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab.com, for a comment, he didn't reply and instead issued a statement, which read, in part:
Today we received an inquiry from reporters about an alleged data breach. We have searched high and low for chatter on the breach on the Internet and can find nothing. We can only presume the 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.
The reporter, without providing us with any evidence of the breach or assistance to identify its veracity, alleged that an archive of Gab public posts, private posts, user profiles, hashed passwords for users, DMs, and plaintext passwords for groups have been leaked via a SQL injection attack. We were aware of a vulnerability in this area and patched it last week. We are also proceeding to undertake a full security audit.
Torba's Gab post about the alleged hack showed less restraint: