Last week, hacking group Anonymous claimed to have stolen and leaked data held by Epik, a website hosting firm popular with far-right organizations like the Proud Boys.
The reams of data, amounting to 150 gigabytes, include information about those who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Epik has historically provided web hosting services to a number of conspiracy theorists and conservative media networks.
On Epik’s clientele list were several sites banned from other platforms for violating hate speech and misinformation policies. These include those associated with the Proud Boys, 8chan, Parler, and QAnon conspiracy groups.
“On September 15, we confirmed that certain customer-account information for our domain-related systems was accessed and downloaded by unauthorized third parties,” tweeted the company, which calls itself the “Swiss Bank of Domains” on its website.
— Epik.com (@EpikDotCom) September 18, 2021
In a statement, Anonymous said they've stolen "a decade’s worth” of company data, including passwords, internal emails and clients’ home addresses and phone numbers.
The breach undermines Epik’s longstanding pledge that customer data would remain anonymous irrespective of views customers might share online.
Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism, told The Washington Post that: “It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting.
“It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”