Pro-Trump social media platform GETTR was targeted by hackers shortly after launch — accounts were apparently compromised and tens of thousands of users had their data scraped and leaked online.
A Twitter-like platform, GETTR was launched on July 4 by Jason Miller, who served as a spokesperson for former U.S. President Donald Trump. The social media service claims to welcome people from all over the world and to promote freedom of speech.
Both the site and the GETTR mobile app highly resemble Twitter, and the platform even allows users to sign up using their Twitter accounts, claiming to be able to import content from Twitter.
The site, however, was opened to the public with unresolved security issues that were immediately exploited by hackers to gain access to the data of those who had already registered on GETTR.
On Sunday, an individual using the moniker of JubaBaghdad hacked GETTR and defaced some of the high-profile accounts on the social media platform, changing them to show the message “@JubaBaghdad was here 🙂 ^^ free palestine ^^.”
The hacker told Business Insider that hacking GETTR was easy from a technical perspective.
JubaBaghdad — and likely others — also scraped a significant amount of data from the new service.
According to Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, the attackers exploited improper API implementations to access user data.
“This allowed them to extract usernames, names, bios, bdays, but most importantly, the emails which were supposed to be private, of over 85,000 users,” Alon Gal revealed on Twitter.
The collected data was shared on RaidForums, a popular hacker forum. The leaked files contained 87.971 entries, including user IDs, usernames, email addresses, nicknames, profile pictures, birth year, location, and more.
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