Home Ideas Hackers Vandalize Communities With Pro-Trump MAGA Messages

Hackers Vandalize Communities With Pro-Trump MAGA Messages

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Hackers put pro-Trump messages all over various corners of Reddit on Friday.

Hackers put pro-Trump messages all over various corners of Reddit on Friday.
Photo: Nicholas Kamm (AFP (Getty Images)

Reddit got Trumped. On Friday, many users visited their favorite subreddits and found something unexpected: pro-Donald Trump Make America Great Again campaign banners and messages supporting the president. It was not a coincidence.

Weeks after Twitter suffered an embarrassing hack that compromised influential accounts, attackers took aim at Reddit on Friday, specifically at a number of popular and high-profile subreddit communities, such as r/space, r/food, r/Japan, r/nfl, r/cfb and r/podcasts, among many others. The coordinated attack involved vandalizing the subreddits—which together have millions of subscribers—by plastering pro-Trump images on them and, in many cases, posting messages affirming support for the president from hacked moderator accounts, per Wired.

One example of these messages could be found on r/cfb, a subreddit dedicated to college football. Wired reports that in the message, the hackers called on people to vote for the president in November, called the coronavirus a “hoax” and included a list titled “Ten Things Democrats Did Wrong.”

“We on behalf of the American people want to implore and strongly encourage you all to vote Trump in the 2020 elections of the USA of America,” read one message from a hacked moderator’s account.

You can check out what some of the hacked subreddits looked like below.

In a statement to Wired on Friday, Reddit said it was investigating the incident. The company suspects the attack was carried out via compromised moderator accounts.

“An investigation is underway related to a series of vandalized communities,” a Reddit spokesperson said. “It appears the source of the attacks were compromised moderator accounts. We are working to lock down those accounts and restore impacted communities.”

Gizmodo has reached out to Reddit to ask for additional information about the incident but has not received a response yet.

It is unclear how the hackers were able to carry out the coordinated attack. As mentioned above, Reddit believes that the hackers targeted moderator accounts to gain control of the subreddits and vandalize them. Considering the messages posted by some moderator accounts, this seems like a credible theory.

Nonetheless, important questions remain: How were the hackers able to take over moderator accounts? Was it a password or authentication issue? Or was it a Reddit issue? In other words, did hackers gain access from inside Reddit’s systems?

In light of the recent Twitter hack, this new Reddit vandalism attack probably won’t soothe anyone’s security anxiety.

Thankfully, the damage done by the hackers was not irreversible. Once they got control of their subreddits back, moderators began eliminating the changes, deleting messages and images and reverting the communities to their normal state.

[Wired]

Source: gizmodo.com