‘Pink Power Ranger’ hacker deletes ‘white supremacist’ dating site
Martha Root deleted three white supremacist sites. (YouTube)
Martha Root deleted three white supremacist sites. (YouTube)
An ethical hacker successfully deleted three white supremacist websites in front of an elated crowd – all while dressed as a pink Power Ranger.
The semi-anonymous hacktivist, who goes by the name Martha Root, deleted the servers of three neo-Nazi websites live onstage at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany last week.
After giving a talk on ethical hacking alongside journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs, Martha, dressed as Kimberly Hart from the Power Rangers TV series, then proceeded to delete the servers for WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal, as the elated audience applauded.
WhiteDate, a dating website described by Hoffman as “Tinder for Nazis”, was taken down alongside WhiteChild, a sperm and egg donor matching site and WhiteDeal, described by Tech Crunch as a “labour marketplace for racists”.
The administrator for all three sites confirmed they had been taken down in an X/Twitter post, also claiming the hacker had deleted their social media account before it was restored.
“They publicly delete all my websites while the audience rejoices,” the anonymous admin wrote. “This is cyberterrorism.”
A viral clip of the moment, shared across social media, shows Martha opening up a Python code script, which begins erasing the sites and their back-ups, as well as several email accounts associated with the websites.
Speaking to Tech Crunch, they claimed that accessing WhiteDate’s public data was surprisingly easy thanks to “poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush”.
Each user’s images reportedly contained metadata – information attached to an image or video files – containing data that “practically hands out home addresses with a side of awkward selfies”.
“Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website – maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,” Martha wrote in a subsequent post.
After deleting the websites, they proceeded to leak user data including profiles, names, pictures, descriptions, locations, and much more.
The sites had a combined 6,500 users, 86 per cent were men and 14 per cent women, which Martha described as a “gender ratio that makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia”.
