Anonymous claims that the data contains information about the company’s domains and clients. The alleged hacking of Epik may result in the leaking of backend information of the company’s clients to the public.
Last week Anonymous hacktivist collective hacked the official website of the GOP (Texas Republican Party) leaving the party asking for donations to implement better security on their site. Now, the hacktivist group has claimed to have hacked “a decade’s worth of data” belonging to web registration from Epik.
Anonymous claims that the data contains information about the company’s domains and clients. The alleged hacking of Epik may result in the leaking of backend information of the company’s clients to the public.
Epik- A Controversial Web Host
Epik is a controversial firm known for hordes of right-wing clients, including those dropped by other web hosting providers like GoDaddy. Some of its noteworthy clients include conservative social media platforms Parler, Gab, and conspiracy theory-oriented YouTube channels Bitchute and The Donald, a fansite for former US President Donald Trump.
Epik also hosted a website prolifewhistleblower.com that helped users snitch on Texas residents intending for abortions. Later this platform was removed for violation of Epik’s terms of service by collecting third-party data non-consensually.
About the Alleged Hack
A Texas-based independent journalist, Steven Monacelli, first reported the incident in a tweet stating that a large dataset had been stolen from the company as per a press release by 4Chan that was posted by Anonymous.
In this press release, the group revealed that among other items, the most significant bits of data that they have stolen include domain transfers/purchases related information, account credentials of “all Epik customers,” and also the “data dump” from an Epik employee’s email inbox.
The press release noted that this dataset can help anyone trace the “actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the internet.” This eludes activists, researchers, and “just about everybody.”
Company’s Response
Epik was reached out for comment over Anonymous’ claims. In response, the company’s representative stated that they weren’t aware of any such incident that may have resulted in a data breach on such a massive scale.
“We take the security of our clients’ data extremely seriously, and we are investigating the allegation,” the rep noted.
180 GB of Data Allegedly Stolen
On the other hand, whistleblowing group Distributed Denial of Secrets analyzed the data and published additional information on its website explaining that they plan to curate the data for public viewing on their platform.
As of now, according to DDoSecrets’ analysis, the data dump includes extensive registration data of Epik’s users. As per the group’s website, the dump comprises around 180GB of data including:
- All domain purchases
- All domain transfers in/out
- All whois history
- All DNS changes
- All email forwards, catch-alls, etc
- Payment history (no credit card data)
- Account credentials
- Over 500,000 private keys
- A dump of an employee’s mailbox,
- Git repositories
- /home/ and /root/ directories of one of their core systems
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ANONYMOUS is doing right thing.
Awesome!