Gigabytes of data stolen from right-wing extremist website Gab to investigate Capitol storming

The Gab social platform popular with right-wing extremists, which became one of their havens after Donald Trump was blocked on Twitter and other persecution by big tech, has been massively hacked. Activists from the Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) project reported that they took possession of 70 gigabytes of information, including passwords, personal publications and user correspondence. Trump's account was also hit.

The data received by DDoSecrets contains more than 40 million publications. Emma Best, co-founder of the project , told Wired that it is not only about public posts and profiles, but also about publications and messages in closed groups and private accounts, as well as personal and group passwords. According to her, this is all that is needed for an almost complete analysis of Gab users and the content of this social network.

The activists themselves are not going to publish these data, but they are ready to provide them to journalists and researchers for study, including the attack on the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. “This is another goldmine of research for people interested in the militia, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon and everything that surrounds January 6,” Best said.

Commenting on the first reports of the Gab hack, platform CEO Andrew Torba did not at first confirm the fact of a hacker attack, but just in case he assured users that if there was a hack, then the user passwords could not be stolen. In his post on the platform's blog, Torba also admitted that the journalists of the publication that published critical articles about Gab are in contact with hackers and help them in disgracing this social network and harming its users.

Two days later, on February 28, Torba acknowledged the hack, saying that the entire company was working on investigating and fixing the problem, Wired reports. The head of Gab also said that his own account, as well as Trump's account, were compromised.

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We talked about how the first shelter of Trump's radical supporters, the social network Parler, began to be blocked in the United States here , and how the Russian company DDoS-Guard helped it to resume work and what it threatens it with - here .

How the conspiracy movement QAnon, built around a conspiracy theory of pedophile Satanists that Trump is secretly fighting, was involved in the storming of the Capitol, we explained here .