I wonder if u/spez ordered this hack so he can back off and save face. Of course I don’t know the context but that’s the first thing that comes to mind.
Nah, reading this no this hack is personal. They hacked this site months ago and now they’re coming in here looking the heroes of the story? No, they were ignored. The hackers got pissed and now they’re using this as an opportunity to get back at reddit. So what, they got maybe a terabyte of decompressed data at most, and they want 4 million dollars? This feels like some script kiddies utilizing a bad situation after getting ignored, not a professional op.
Is it safe to assume that nothing comes of this… Just like every other “hacker group” pretending they hacked some major entitity for a good cause?
What onion address is that?
So they “broke into Reddit” back in February and contacted Reddit in April. After Reddit didn’t react they contacted them again a few days ago at this very opportunistic time.
They never specified exactly what kind of data they stole, nor did they prove it by providing samples.
For all we know this story could be entirely made up and they actually have nothing.
But even if they have something, them trying to come across as the good guys in this is so weird to me. No, you’re not the good guys. You are criminals.
February? Then I believe they have obtained a full copy of all posts and comments on the site. /s
(For those who don’t get the joke: https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps - full dumps of all Reddit data up to February exist, and I think archive.org has the March file too)
They may be the bad guys, but they’re not necessarily bad guys
“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
80gb? That isn’t too much but guess if it’s internal information and docs could be damaging to a public offering.
Might be a single weird Bee Movie video meme as well.
Can you share the onion link here
I’m going with, no. Or, who cares? No biggie.
Is there any way to validate these claims?
Is it weird that I kind of want both groups to lose out here?
The enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
I want the API changes reverted as much as any other Reddit refugees here, but I can’t stand behind this kind of malfeasant extortion.
Not only is it blatantly obvious they’re using the API change rhetoric as a means of irritating Reddit into giving them their hush money, it also avts towards delegitimising all protest efforts made by the Subreddits thus far
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But as the text says, this extortion began 5 days before the API changes were even announced. These criminals don’t give a f*ck about the API and threaten to leak the data of those same users they’re claiming to protect.
I think we should just ignore this, because it’s a distraction for public pressure and will only make Reddit look better - either by delegitimising the protest or by making them look like a victim instead of the perpetrator they are.
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I’m going to say what you did, more diplomatically:
While I don’t condone extortion via hacking or any other means, I acknowledge that Reddit and its’ dysfunctional, incompetent corporate culture - with Huffman at the top - brought this development upon themselves.
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Karma IS a bitch, but I for one am still not going to stand behind illegalities like this. It’s not the way.
As I said before, these hackers don’t care. The grandstanding is their way of getting attention off the backs of the protests. All supporting these criminals does is delegitimise the real protest by making Reddit look like the victim.
That aside, even from a practical standpoint this wouldn’t work longterm. If extorted into backpeddalling, Reddit will just quietly up their data security, and once they’ve made sure the threat of a leak is dealt with, they’ll go right on back to the API change.
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