A hacktivist remotely wiped three white supremacist websites live onstage during a talk at a hacker conference last week. The sites have yet to return online.
The pseudonymous hacker, who goes by Martha Root and was dressed as the Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal in real time. This occurred 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,” is offline. Also offline are WhiteChild, a site that claimed to match white supremacist sperm and egg donors, and WhiteDeal, a labor marketplace for racists.
The administrator of the three websites confirmed the hack on social media, calling the act “cyberterrorism” and vowing repercussions. The administrator also claimed that Root deleted their social media account before it was restored.
Root published data allegedly scraped from WhiteDate online. The hacker criticized the sites’ poor cybersecurity, noting that users’ images included precise geolocation metadata. Root mocked the operators, suggesting they master hosting WordPress before attempting world domination.
The leaked data includes user profiles with names, pictures, descriptions, age, location with precise coordinates, gender, language, race, and other personal information. Root stated that for now there are no emails, passwords, or private conversations in the release.
According to the leaked data, WhiteDate had more than 6,500 users, of which 86 percent were men and 14 percent were women. Root quipped that this gender ratio makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia.
Root infiltrated the sites using AI chatbots that bypassed verification processes and were verified as “white,” according to the talk’s abstract.
DDoSecrets, a nonprofit collective that stores leaked datasets in the public interest, announced it has received files and user information from the three white supremacist websites. The collective, calling this release “WhiteLeaks,” has not publicly released the data but is asking verified journalists and researchers to request access to the full 100 gigabyte dataset.
The administrator of the three websites did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to an email address shown during the conference talk. An email sent to an address appearing in the public domain records of two of the websites also received no immediate response.
Root, Hoffmann, and Fuchs claim to have identified the real identity of the websites’ administrator as a woman from Germany. This identity could not be independently confirmed.