(OPINION) ETH – Despite conservative social media network, Parler being scrubbed from the internet in the early hours of Monday morning, hackers claim they have found a way to download all data posted by users — including messages, images, videos, and users’ location data —
that was shared during last week’s attack on the Capitol and many Trump supporters are voicing their concerns regarding what the data dump could expose about them and their activity in Washington, D.C. last week. According to a report from VICE, A hacker that goes by the name “Crash Override” went on Twitter claiming they were able to reverse-engineer the Parler iOS app,
in order to find a web address that the application uses internally to retrieve data allowing hackers to make a list of all posts, videos, and images uploaded to Parler — including posts that users had deleted, such as those referring to the Capitol attack last Wednesday.
VICE stated: “The hacker set up a crowdsourcing system where multiple people could help download the content. The downloaded data is now being processed before being uploaded to the Internet Archive, where anyone will be able to view or download it — including the open-source intelligence community and law enforcement agencies”.
Some Parler members expressed great concern over the hack and one even stated: “The intent is a mass dox and a list to hold patriots ‘accountable’. It is too late to scrub your data, and it’s already archived. There is nothing you can do to prevent what’s already happened. All you can do is prepare for the fallout. Accountability may come in many forms for our free speech, doxing, jobs might be called, addresses leaked and people coming to your house, etc.”
