An ongoing Reddit hack has seen popular communities flooded with pro-Donald Trump imagery and messages.
More than a dozen popular subreddits, including r/space, r/food, r/Japan and r/NFL have been taken over by the hackers, who changed themes and made posts endorsing the president and his re-election campaign.
Many of the channels were restored to their glory, but some were quickly defaced once again. Reddit is yet to comment on the source or severity of the hack, but the size and number of high profile communities affected suggests a high-level moderator’s privileges have been compromised.
“About 30 minutes ago, a whole bunch of subreddits changed their CSS and themes to pro-Trump content. This is the result of accounts being hacked, and Reddit admins are actively investigating,” wrote u/sloth_on_meth on the OutOfTheLoop subreddit, which was among the accounts commenting on the hack.
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A Reddit spokesperson called the hack an act of ‘vandalism’, while reports the accounts affected had two-factor authentication enabled appear to be wide of the mark.
The spokesperson said: “An investigation is underway related to a series of vandalised communities. It appears the source of the attacks were compromised moderator accounts. We are working to lock down those accounts and restore impacted communities.”
The SubredditDrama account lists the affected communities and is imploring account moderators to change their passwords even if they believe the account is safe.
The mod wrote: “These accounts are usually compromised because someone’s used the same user/pass combo on another forum with weak security. The passwords leak, the accounts get compromised, and I wake up to TRUMP 2020 all over my drag sub. Fix your shit, people.”
There’s no indication of how or why the the hack was carried out, but the company recently banned high profile Trump-supporting r/TheDonald community. This could be a revenge attack of sorts, but that’s yet to be confirmed.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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