A hacktivist exposed and deleted three white supremacist websites during a presentation at a conference last week.
The hacker and self-described journalist, who goes by Martha Root, appeared onstage dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, and was joined by journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs.
Near the end of the presentation, Root remotely deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild and WhiteDeal to cheers from the audience.
The owner of the dating, family and job sites confirmed the hack in a post on X, writing, “At min 43, they publicly delete all my websites while the audience rejoices. This is cyberterrorism. No wonder some of them hide their faces. But we will find them, and trust me, there will be repercussions.”
White Supremacist Websites Data Leaked
Root was able to extract significant data from more than 6,000 users from WhiteDate and published much of it on the site okstupid.lol, an apparent pun referencing OkCupid.
Root did not include emails and private messages “for now,” but also apparently shared the full data set with DDoSecrets and HaveIBeenPwned.
Root wrote on okstupid that their investigation into WhiteDate revealed “Poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush,” “Image metadata (EXIF) so revealing, it practically hands out home addresses with a side of awkward selfies,” and “A gender ratio that makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia.”
“Imagine calling yourselves the “master race” but forgetting to secure your own website—maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,” Root taunted on the site.
Root mapped the user data on an interactive map, and indeed, the location data is precise, with specific digital latitude and longitude coordinates capable of identifying a user’s address. Coupled with additional information such as profile pictures and the redacted email addresses, user identification would appear to be possible in many cases.
Chatbot Used to Investigate White Supremacist Dating Site
Root also used a custom AI chatbot to interact with users and scale data collection. As they noted in a video, “Some of WhiteDate’s most dedicated Aryan suitors spent weeks chatting with a chatbot, trained, prompted, monitored by me. And while they flirted with their perfect trad wife, I collected data.”
According to their abstract, Root, Hoffmann and Fuchs claim that “After months of observation, classic OSINT research, automated conversation analysis, and web scraping, we discovered who is behind these platforms and how their infrastructure works.”
According to HaveIBeenPwned, the WhiteDate data set includes Ages, Astrological signs, Bios, Education levels, Email addresses, Family structure, Genders, Geographic locations, Income levels, IQ levels, Nicknames, Physical attributes, Profile photos, Races, Relationship status and Sexual orientation.
HaveIBeenPwned labeled the data as “sensitive,” and noted, “As this breach has been flagged as sensitive, it is not publicly searchable.” Users must sign in to their dashboard to review search results, and DDoSecrets has restricted access to the data too.
The name Martha Root appears to be a pseudonym taken from an American peace activist from the early 20th century.