- When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, 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.
- Gab, which inherited some of Parler’s displaced users, has been badly hacked. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications.
- 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.
- Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.
- Passwords for private groups are unencrypted, which Torba says the platform discloses to users when they create one. Individual user account passwords appear to be cryptographically hashed.
- The Gab hack is just the latest in a recent string of apparent “hacktivist” breaches, many of which have ended with DDoSecrets publishing reams of stolen data, or making it privately available to journalists and researchers.
– Andy Greenberg | February 28, 2021
