The alt-tech "free speech"-oriented social network Gab suffered a data-breach Wednesday, affecting more than four million of its users.
The breached social network service recently gained attention after Big-Tech started censoring conservative user’s from its platforms, including banning the former President of the United States Donald Trump.
According to Have I Been Pwned, the data breach exposed user’s emails, passwords, private chats, and lists of public groups and posts.
“In February 2021, the alt-tech social network service Gab suffered a data breach. The incident exposed almost 70GB of data including 4M user accounts, a small number of private chat logs and a list of public groups and public posts made to the service. Only a small number of accounts included email addresses and / or passwords stored as bcrypt hashes with a total of 66.5k unique email addresses being exposed across the corpus of data,” said Have I Been Pwned in a statement.
Although Gab offers a platform to those banned from social media networks— like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for allegedly spreading misinformation about election fraud—user's have been critical of the network for their ‘slow’ and ‘unresponsive’ servers as they struggle to keep up with the influx of new users.
Firefox Monitor alerted its users of Gab’s data-breach on Wednesday.
On Twitter, Gab founder Andrew Torba blamed "mentally ill tranny demon hackers (I'm very serious)" for the hack.
— Gab.com (@getongab) February 28, 2021
The breach did not expose unencrypted passwords of users, but rather passwords of group admins, which are independent of user passwords. As mentioned by Gab users on Twitter, the would-be group creator is informed that these passwords are stored as plain text during group creation.
That being said, if you were planning on staying anonymous with your account and tied it to your personal email address, your individual self will be traced back to the inappropriate account name.
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