Further to Reddit's recent woes since the announcement of the API pricing change, claims have surfaced that it has suffered a data breach at the hands of BlackCat , with 80GB of zipped data taken.

cross-posted from: https://chat.maiion.com/post/3401

Reddit’s week appears to have gone from bad to worse, as AlphV (aka BlackCat) has claimed that operators broke into Reddit’s servers on February 5, 2023, and took 80 GB of zipped data. . Furthermore, Reddit has been contacted by BlackCat, once on April 13 and again on June 16, with no response and no attempt to find out what was taken. Following recent fallout from the subreddit blackouts, and the controversial comments from CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit has been having a tough time in the eyes of its users who have been reportedly leaving the platform and setting up alternatives on the fediverse (such as Lemmy or kbin), used by the Twitter alternative Mastodon.

https://www.neowin.net/news/reddit-claimed-to-have-been-hacked-by-blackcat-and-it-has-threatened-to-leak-the-data/

https://www.databreaches.net/blackcat-claims-they-hacked-reddit-and-will-leak-the-data/

    • @GlitzyArmrestEnglish
      24•1 year ago

      This is why I hate when articles mention the size of the data - that rarely actually matters. What matters is what makes up the data - 80GB is one BluRay, or the entirety of English Wikipedia’s text.

      • @TechnoBabbleEnglish
        6•1 year ago

        Well the size is somewhat important.

        It gives a glimpse into what could have been stolen.

        But I agree it’s not like 80GB of hack is automatically worse than 20GB of hack if it’s stolen source code or payment information or similar.

      • konaltEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        Didn’t know BluRays could be that large, I’ve only heard of them going up to 25 or 50. Any more info on this?

    • Something Burger 🍔English
      19•1 year ago

      If it’s only text, it’s four times as big as the entirety of English Wikipedia.

    • @thayerEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      A snapshot of all of reddit’s public text posts up to March 2023 runs about 38GB compressed (zstd) on archive.org. Decompressed, it’s well over 300GB.

      An internal zstd of 80GB may contain private messages as well or other morsels.

    • jerryEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      It’s internal stuff, so yeah 80gb could be quite damning, the group claims it shows things reddit doesn’t want people to see.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Maybe it includes unsalted password hashes and we all happened to use the same few passwords.