Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Anonymous is a decentralized virtual community. They are commonly referred to as an internet-based collective of hacktivists whose goals, like its organization, are decentralized. Anonymous seeks mass awareness and revolution against what the organization perceives as corrupt entities, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Anonymous has had a hacktivist impact. This is a timeline of activities reported to be carried out by the group.
Friendica is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers.
On 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing what it called the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures and ministries and from companies including Finmeccanica and Brown Lloyd James dating from August 2006 to March 2012. The emails were hacked by Anonymous before being given to WikiLeaks for release.
Gab is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service known for its far-right userbase. Widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, antisemites, the alt-right, supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives, right-libertarians, and believers in conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Gab has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. Founded in 2016 and launched publicly in May 2017, Gab claims to promote free speech, individual liberty, the "free flow of information online", and Christian values. Researchers and journalists have characterized these assertions as an obfuscation of its extremist ecosystem. Antisemitism is prominent in the site's content and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Gab CEO Andrew Torba has promoted the white genocide conspiracy theory. Gab is based in Pennsylvania.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
The fediverse is a collection of social networking servers which can communicate with each other, while remaining independently controlled from each other. Users on different social networks and websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia and other files to and from others across the network.
Epik is an American domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to alt-tech websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist materials. It has been described as a "safehaven for the extreme right" because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.
The 2018 Google data breach was a major data privacy scandal in which the Google+ API exposed the private data of over five hundred thousand users.
On 15 July 2019, a massive data breach of the National Revenue Agency (NRA) of Bulgaria was revealed. The hacker responsible for the breach sent an email to major Bulgarian media outlets, detailing the scope of the attack.
Iron March was a far-right neo-fascist and Neo-Nazi web forum. The site opened in 2011 and attracted neo-fascist and Neo-Nazi members, including militants from organized far-right groups and members who would later go on to commit acts of terror. The forum closed in 2017. Subsequently, former users moved to alternative websites and social networking services, such as Discord. In 2019, an anonymous individual leaked the database that hosted all Iron March content.
GiveSendGo is a Christian crowdfunding website. GiveSendGo has attracted controversy for allowing far-right, neo-Nazi, alt-right, and white supremacist activists and hate groups to fundraise.
The Epik data breach occurred in September and October 2021, targeting the American domain registrar and web hosting company Epik. The breach exposed a wide range of information including personal information of customers, domain history and purchase records, credit card information, internal company emails, and records from the company's WHOIS privacy service. More than 15 million unique email addresses were exposed, belonging to customers and to non-customers whose information had been scraped. The attackers responsible for the breach identified themselves as members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. The attackers released an initial 180 gigabyte dataset on September 13, 2021, though the data appeared to have been exfiltrated in late February of the same year. A second release, this time containing bootable disk images, was made on September 29. A third release on October 4 reportedly contained more bootable disk images and documents belonging to the Texas Republican Party, a customer of Epik's.
Aubrey Cottle, also known as Kirtaner or Kirt, is a Canadian website forum administrator who claims to be an FBI informant and early member of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Cottle was involved with Anonymous during the late 2000s and in its resurgence beginning in 2020, in which the group attempted to combat the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon.
Eugen Rochko is a Russian-born German software developer, best known as the creator of Mastodon, a decentralized open-source social networking platform consisting of a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.
