Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live on stage during hacker conference

Summary

A hacktivist remotely wiped three white supremacist websites live on stage during their talk at a hacker conference last week, with the sites yet to return online. The pseudonymous hacker, who goes by Martha Root — dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers — deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal in real-time at the end of a talk at the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. Root gave the talk alongside journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs, who wrote an article about the hacked sites for the German weekly paper Die Zeit in October. As of this writing WhiteDate, which Hoffmann described as a “Tinder for Nazis”; WhiteChild, a site that claimed to match white supremacists’ sperm and egg donors; and WhiteDeal, a sort-of Taskrabbit-esque labor marketplace for racists, are all offline. The administrator of the three websites confirmed the hack on their social media accounts. “They publicly delete all my websites while the audience rejoices. This is cyberterrorism,” the administrator wrote on X on Sunday, vowing repercussions. The administrator also claimed that Root deleted their X account before it was restored. Root also published the data allegedly scraped from WhiteDate online. The hacker said that they scraped WhiteDate’s public data and found “poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush.” Root said that users’ images included precise geolocation metadata that “practically hands out home addresses with a side of awkward selfies.” “Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website — maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,” Root wrote. The leaked data includes users’ profiles with name, pictures, description, age, location (both containing precise coordinates and user-set country and state), gender, language, race, and other personal information that users uploaded. Root wrote on the site that “for now” there are no emails,...