Fringe social media platform Gab hacked

Gab, a fringe social media platform with a high concentration of far-right users, has been hacked, with a large trove of data including passwords and private messages being taken.

The platform’s CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the hack, which was first reported by Wired on Sunday, in a tweet that also included a transphobic slur. 

According to the leaktivist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) roughly 70 gigabytes of posts, private messages, profiles and plaintext passwords were obtained in the hack.

The group says the data was provided to them by a hacktivist who identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project.”

DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best said in a post on the group’s site that they will not be publicly releasing the data because it includes sensitive information, and will instead be sharing it with journalists and researchers focused on right-wing extremism.

“While the dataset is extremely important to understanding recent and current events, as well as being a valuable historical archive, it also represents privacy concerns,” they said.

Apart from Torba’s social media post, the CEO also released a statement on the company’s corporate blog refuting that a hack took place and implying that the Wired journalist who first covered the hack was working with the hacker to “smear” Gab.