Hacktivist takes down white supremacist websites live on stage during hacker conference

A hacker activist remotely deleted three white supremacist websites on stage while speaking at a hacker conference last week, and the sites have yet to come back online.

The pseudonymous hacker, known as Martha Root – and dressed as the Pink Ranger from Power Rangers – took down the WhiteDate, WhiteChild and WhiteDeal servers in real time at the end of a talk at the annual Chaos Communication conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Rott gave the lecture alongside journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs, who wrote an article about the hacked websites for the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit in October.

As of this writing, WhiteDate, which Hoffman describes as “Tinder for Nazis”; WhiteChild, a site that claimed to match white supremacists with sperm and egg donors; and WhiteDeal, a Taskrabbit-like job marketplace for racists, are all offline.

The administrator of the three sites confirmed the hack through their social media accounts.

“They are publicly deleting all my websites while the public rejoices.

The official also claimed that Root deleted his X account before restoring it.

Root also posted data allegedly obtained from WhiteDate online.

The hacker said they deleted WhiteDate’s public data and found “poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make your grandmother’s AOL account red.” Users’ photos included precise geolocation metadata that “practically distributes home addresses with a side of awkward selfies,” Root said.

“Imagine calling yourself a ‘race master’ but forgetting to secure your website – perhaps trying to master WordPress hosting before world domination,” Root wrote.

The leaked data includes user profiles with name, photos, description, age, location (both containing precise coordinates and the country selected by the user), gender, language, ethnicity and other personal information uploaded by users. Root wrote on the site that “at this time” there are no emails, passwords or private chats.

According to the leaked data, WhiteData had more than 6,500 users, of whom 86% were men and 14% were women. “The gender ratio makes Smurf Village look like a feminist utopia,” Root wrote.

Root infiltrated sites using AI-powered chatbots that bypassed verifications and were verified as “white,” according to a summary of the conversations.

DDoSecrets, a non-profit collective that stores leaked data sets for the public interest, announced that it had received “files and user information” from the three white supremacist sites. The group, which is calling this release “WhiteLeaks,” has not released the data publicly but is instead asking accredited journalists and researchers to request access to the full 100GB data set.

The administrator for the three sites did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment sent to the email address provided during the conference talk. TechCrunch also sent an email to an address that appears in public domain records for two of the three websites. The person behind this address also did not immediately respond to our email.

Root, Hoffman, and Fuchs claim to have identified the real identity of the site manager as a woman from Germany. TechCrunch was unable to independently confirm the identity of the administrator.