Screenshot by Ry Crist / CNET
A number of Reddit communities were taken over as part of an obvious large-scale hack on Friday morning. A deluge of pictures and posts supported President Trump's re-election campaign.
According to the users of the website, the affected communities, so-called subreddits, showed abrupt changes sometime around 7 a.m. The banner images were changed to pro-Trump images and a spate of posts declared the president's support.
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"Investigations are currently underway into a number of communities that have been destroyed," a Reddit spokesman told CNET. "It appears that the source of the attacks was compromised moderator accounts. We are working to lock these accounts and restore affected communities."
Screenshot from ZDNet
Most of the affected subreddits we've scanned so far appear to be back to normal.
"As you may have noticed, our sub-banner has changed quite a bit," wrote the mods of r / duschbier. "This is a direct result of hacking our mod team. Rest assured we are working feverishly to fix this."
"Today someone hacked one of our mods and hijacked the submarine (fun !!!) so it all looked like this ... we're going to go with 'not soccer'," said Reddit user jdpatric, a moderator of the r / NFL subreddits. The company has more than 1 million subscribers. "In any case, we're rolling everything back to before the collapse and it seems to be going well."
Here is the current list of verified illegible accounts. I counted 63 (probably more) combined for tens of millions of subscribers pic.twitter.com/G90E7np5O4
- Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) August 7, 2020
According to ZDNet, where reporters tracked the hack, the list of affected submarines, which now stands at 91, includes the following:
- r / NFL
- r / 49ers
- r / TPB (Pirate Bay Reddit Channel)
- r / BlackMirror
- r / beer
- r / Vancouver
- r / Dallas
- r / Buffy
- r / Gorillaz
- r / Disneyland
- r / podcasts
- r / BostonCeltics
- r / freefolk
- r / StartledCats
- r / TheDailyZeitgeist
- r / supernatural
- r / hentaimemes
- r / GRE
- r / GMAT
- r / greatbritishbakeoff
- r / 11foot8
- r / truecrimepodcasts
- r / Leafs
- r / wedding planning
- r / Chadsriseup
- r / bertstrips
- r / CFB
Reddit users following the hack reported takeovers of numerous other subreddits on Friday morning, including r / blackpeopletwitter, r / EDM, r / avengers, and r / PoliticalDiscussion.
