Reddit got Trump. 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 no accident.
Weeks after Twitter suffered shy hack that compromised influential accounts, attackers took Friday on Reddit, specifically on a number 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 to confirm the president’s support for hacked moderators. accounts, per Wired.
One example of these posts 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, calling the coronavirus a ‘hoax’ and including a list entitled ‘Ten Things Democrats Did Wrong. ‘
“We, on behalf of the American people, want to encourage you all and strongly encourage you to vote for Trump in the United States elections in 2020,” read one message from the account of a hacked moderator.
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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 suspected that the attack was carried out through compromised moderator accounts.
“An investigation is under way into a series of vandalized communities,” a Reddit spokesman said. “It seems that the source of the attacks were compromised moderator accounts. We are working to rewrite these accounts and restore affected communities. ”
Gizmodo reached out to Reddit to ask for additional information about the incident, but has not yet received a response.
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 over the subreddits and vandalize them. Considering the posts posted by some moderator accounts, this seems like a plausible theory.
However, 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 problem? In other words, have hackers gained access from within Reddit’s systems?
In light of the recent Twitter hack, this new Reddit vandalism attack is unlikely to overwhelm anyone’s security fears.
Fortunately, the damage done by the hackers was not irreversible. Once they gained control of their subreddits, moderators began to eliminate the changes, delete messages and images, and restore communities to their normal state.
[Wired]
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