Hacktivist Group Anonymous Leaks 180GB of Far-Right Data
- Exploit
- Hacking
- Organization
- Epik
- Industry
- Technology, Web Hosting
The legendary hacktivist group Anonymous made headlines this week, as they claimed to have stolen gigabytes of data from Epik, a domain name, web hosting and DNS provider for many politically, right-wing and extremist websites. The stolen data set of over 180GB containing “decade’s worth of data” was made available online as a torrent.
Anonymous believes they have exposed enough data to prove "all that's needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the Internet that has eluded researchers, activists, and, well, just about everybody." In doing so, the unearthed customers' data and identities can now be freely exposed to anyone including activists, researchers, or even actors with a more nefarious intention.
Early reports on the scope of the data are estimating over 15 million unique email addresses and other personal information are included in the data collection. From the sheer size and volume of data that was leaked, experts are predicting for any and all Epik customers that it is safe to assume their information has been stolen in the incident.
Company officials from Epik are calling the incident “an egregious violation against our users,” while the company’s founder, Robert Monster, is pleading that people do not use the stolen data with any “negative intent.”
Some researchers expect the full scope of the data may not be revealed anytime soon based on the sheer magnitude of the stolen cache. However, we can be sure that further fallout is expected to come.