A hacktivist remotely wiped three white supremacist websites live onstage during their talk at a hacker conference last week, with the sites yet to return online.
The pseudonymous hacker, who goes by Martha Root — dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers — deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal in real time 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”; WhiteChild, a site that claimed to match white supremacists’ sperm and egg donors; and WhiteDeal, a sort-of Taskrabbit-esque labor marketplace for racists, are all offline.
The administrator of the three websites confirmed the hack on their social media accounts.
“They publicly delete all my websites while the audience rejoices. This is cyberterrorism,” the administrator wrote on X on Sunday, vowing repercussions.
The administrator also claimed that Root deleted their X account before it was restored.
Root also published the data allegedly scraped from WhiteDate online.
The hacker said that they scraped WhiteDate’s public data and found “poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush.” Root said that users’ images included precise geolocation metadata that “practically hands out home addresses with a side of awkward selfies.”
“Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website — maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,” Root wrote.
The leaked data includes users’ profiles with name, pictures, description, age, location (both containing precise coordinates and user-set country and state), gender, language, race, and other personal information that users uploaded. Root wrote on the site that “for now” there are no emails, passwords, or private conversations.
According to the leaked data, WhiteDate had more than 6,500 users, of which 86% were men and 14% women. “A gender ratio that makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia,” Root wrote.
Root infiltrated the sites using AI chatbots that bypassed verification processes and were verified as “white,” according to the talks’ abstract.
DDoSecrets, a nonprofit collective that stores leaked datasets in the public interest, announced that it has received “files and user information” from the three white supremacist websites. The collective, which calls this release “WhiteLeaks,” has not publicly released the data but is instead 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 TechCrunch’s request for comment, which was sent to an email address shown during the conference talk. TechCrunch also sent an email to an address that appears on the public domain records of two of the three websites. The person behind that address also did not immediately respond to our email.
Root, Hoffmann, and Fuchs claim to have identified the real identity of the websites’ administrator as a woman from Germany. TechCrunch could not independently confirm the identity of the administrator.
