It all started with a Tweet. At 3:50PM Eastern time Kevin Abosch an artist known primarily for his work using his own blood to stamp images of Bitcoin hashes posted the above message on Twitter.
Soon thereafter images started circulating on Twitter of a WordPress configuration file purporting to be from Parler, with claims that the whole site was somehow based on WordPress and that everything was stored unencrypted.
A screen shot of a WordPress configuration file is NOT proof of a hack. This could be easily faked by anyone with the technical skills to install WordPress on a machine and modify the configuration file to reference Parler.
Shortly thereafter entrepreneur William LeGate posted the below.
LeGate refers to Mr. Abosch as a New York Times reporter, which gives credence to the story that the site had been hacked. The story of the Parler hack continued to spread as this account and many others started to spread word.
Mr. LeGate later set the record straight about Abosch’s supposed Times affiliation, but not before the story had gained considerable traction.
The only primary sources we can find for the hack are four Twitter accounts claiming to have either had access to the Parler data or to have had some first hand knowledge of how the hack was done.
The third account to claim inside knowledge of the hack was @johnjhacking, who posted a lengthy thread on the matter (see below). That thread has since been deleted from Twitter.
The fourth and final person who potentially had access to the data is @0xBanana (jason), @find_evil identifies him as someone who was able to access John Jackson’s (@johnjhacking) personal data from Parler’s records. 0xBanana then rewteeded @find_evil’s claim (see below).
No one has claimed credit for the hack as of the time of this writing, and it’s unclear what connection (if any) to the hack the above persons have.
CEO John Matze of Parler.com has released a statement denying that the website was hacked.
Until further information is available it remains unclear if Parler’s data was truly compromised, and if it was to what extent.
This story is developing.
