Far-right social media website Gab was severely hacked on Sunday night by the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets which collected more than 70 gigabytes of the platform’s data, including from former US President Donald Trump’s account, representing more than 40 million posts, the Wired.com website reported.
Gab inherited Parler’s users after the extremist platform was dropped by Amazon following US election controversies and the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
The hackers said that their action was aimed at exposing the platform’s largely right-wing users. Indeed, Gab’s posts include large numbers of QAnon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists and promoters of Trump’s election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the storming of the Capitol.
DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best said in a text message interview to Wired that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles – with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site – but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords.
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.
“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 added.
“It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far-right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”
The hacked data also includes a chatlogs.txt file that appears to contain private conversations between the site’s users. That file’s contents begin with an added note from JaXpArO: “F**K TRUMP. F**K COLONIZERS & CAPITALISTS. DEATH TO AMERIKKKA.”
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