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The circulating dataset contains the apparent email addresses and passwords of members of the suspect organizations, and coronavirus conspiracy theorists believe this proves that the Gates Foundation was hacked. Even though this dataset is now widely circulating in white-nationalist circles and on social media, it evidently means relatively little in it that is currently valid, and many of the emails and passwords are likely outdated, as Ben Makuch reported recently for Vice.
Nonetheless, it underscored how eager the extremist right has become to disrupt the attempts by western democracies to respond adequately to the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the discussion around the hacks, particularly the claims of nefarious plots with COVID-19 as a bioweapon, has been aimed at “accelerationist” hopes to use the pandemic as a means to bring down those democracies.
“Neo-Nazis and white supremacists capitalized on the lists and published them aggressively across their venues,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism and terrorist groups. “Using the data, far-right extremists were calling for a harassment campaign while sharing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic. The distribution of these alleged email credentials were just another part of a months-long initiative across the far right to weaponize the COVID-19 pandemic.”
SITE Intelligence says that it first noticed the data dump, followed by its migration to a channel on the encrypted-chat platform Telegram, one with over 5,000 followers and purportedly frequented by members of such neo-Nazi terrorist organizations as Atomwaffen Division and The Base.
“Far-right extremists’ distribution of allegedly hacked data by organizations like WHO and the Gates Foundation is fitting to how they’ve targeted medical organizations and personnel amid the pandemic,” said Katz. “Whether out of accelerationist or conspiratorial-minded motivations, white supremacists and Neo-Nazis have called to vandalize hospitals, intentionally infect medical workers, and beyond.”
However, any damage that befalls the organization due to the spread of the hacked data will probably be less significant than the harm caused by the spread of the misinformation about the nature of the virus and its spread. Conspiracy theories are capable of inspiring both the further spread of the virus by people who don’t believe the pandemic is real, as well as violent terroristic acts by people angered at, alternatively, the government for its lockdown public-health measures, and conspiracists’ suspected real sources of the virus—such as 5G technology—or more common, the Chinese government and its people, including Asian Americans.
“Far-right communities online have an enormous capacity to disseminate this hacked data, especially as their audience grow amid this pandemic,” Katz noted.
