"Tribal Love" and 100 Gigabytes of Shame. Hackers Breach "Tinder for Racists"
Behind the facade of an "exclusive club" lay total insecurity.
Behind the facade of an "exclusive club" lay total insecurity.
Over 100 GB of user data from ultra-right online platforms has been made publicly available following an exposé by an independent researcher using the pseudonym Martha Ruth. She infiltrated closed communities, including the WhiteDate platform, marketed as a dating site for adherents of racist ideology, as well as the related WhiteChild and WhiteDeal sites. The leak exposed over 8,000 profiles, including photos and sensitive personal information.
The WhiteDate project targeted "Caucasians seeking tribal love" and had a distinctly radical slant. WhiteChild focused on family and "heritage" themes, while WhiteDeal was positioned as a professional network for people with similar views. All three resources were controlled by a far-right activist from Germany, but their operations are legally linked to the company Horn & Partners, registered in France.
According to reports, the platform had extremely weak security, allowing Ruth and her associates to easily gain access to a vast trove of data. No sophisticated hacking was required—simple manipulation of the site's URL sufficed. She used fake profiles, generated by language models and visually similar to real users. These bots not only passed verification but also engaged in correspondence with real people, highlighting the vulnerability of the system's vetting and moderation.
The collected database includes information on age, gender, place of residence, income level, religious views, marital status, education, appearance, and even users' self-reported IQ. In some cases, photos retained metadata revealing geolocation, the device used, and the time of capture. The researcher also drew attention to a gender imbalance—the overwhelming majority of profiles belonged to men.
The scale of the leak is underscored by the fact that the data is presented on an interactive map created by Ruth, showing the geographical distribution of users. This makes potential de-anonymization significantly easier, especially given the volume of information available.
The research and collected materials were presented at the Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, where journalists involved in the investigation also spoke. All data was handed over to the platform Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), which specializes in publishing information of public interest.
According to Ruth, the initiative began as an attempt to understand how such communities form and quickly evolved into a social experiment. Using a combination of data analysis methods, automated information gathering, and classic open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques, she documented the project's ideology, user interactions, and management structure.
During her observations, Ruth determined that the platform's creator aimed to transform it into a centralized network, uniting people with racist beliefs under the guise of a simple dating platform. At the same time, users were regularly reminded of the threat from "hostile elements" and "external interference."
The nature of the work caused a stir not only due to the volume of the leak but also because of the unique method of data acquisition. Some platform participants, it is claimed, even developed emotional attachments to the fake profiles, unaware they were communicating with automated algorithms. All of this highlights how vulnerable closed online communities can be, even when they cater to a narrow circle of like-minded individuals.
