It's a bad day for Proud Boys and MAGA riot organizers.
They had been depending on the anonymity of the internet to protect their day jobs as they went about promoting racist rioting and the, um, overthrow of the US government.
Turns out their passwords (middle name plus current house number, really?) have been exposed in a major hack of their chosen right-wing service provider, a company called Epik.
According to The Washington Post, "Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity."
Anonymous no more!
But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.
Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.
“It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”
CNN quotes "Emily Crose, a cybersecurity analyst who studies online extremism, said the breach 'will be another factor causing paranoia among far-right communities online.' Crose said those groups already feel like they're under surveillance, given their violent attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election."
Ya think? I would assume all of these right-wing seditionist groups have at least one employee of Merrick Garland working undercover within their organization. If they don't now, they will after this hack. The FBI has no shortage of white guys who can play gun-loving MAGA moron in disguise.
Add to this Ali Alexander an (alleged!) organizer of the January 6 MAGA sedition riot, and definite spreader of the Big Lie re the 2020 election. Ali tried to hide at least 100 websites of which he was owner.
Ali can run but his trail was exposed by the hack. Oh noes what about my "right to privacy!"
Tell that to women in Texas, jackass.
