Far-Right Platform Gab Hit With a Massive Hack

Data belonging to Alex Jones, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell may be included

Alex Jones and his phone. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

A hacker targeted far-right social network Gab and stole more than 70 gigabytes of user data, including 40 million posts and private messages, Wired reported on Sunday.

Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the hack on Sunday, claiming the platform was attacked by “demon hackers” and referred to these individuals using a transphobic slur, The Verge noted.

The hacker identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” and “siphoned that data out of Gab’s backend databases in an effort to expose the platform’s largely right-wing users,” according to Wired. The data was reportedly retrieved through an SQL injection vulnerability, allowing the hacker to interfere with Gab’s backend database.

Included in the dataset are more than 70,000 messages and more than 19,000 chats by roughly 15,000 users. Some of this content includes items posted to private profiles and groups. Also included are user and group passwords. (The passwords were reportedly cryptographically hashed, Wired noted, meaning they had been scrambled into a different, unreadable string.)

The hack was revealed on Sunday night by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a data transparency collective of researchers and journalists. DDoSecrets is calling the trove GabLeaks and is distributing the data on a limited basis to journalists, academics, and researchers, the group wrote in a Monday statement. It says that while the dataset is an important historical artifact, it also comes with significant privacy concerns, in part related to “the presence of passwords and other PII,” which is why it is being shared selectively.

“It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6,” DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best told Wired. Gab has long harbored white supremacists and far-right extremists and is known for platforming the anti-Semitic gunman responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting in 2018.