Hackers are defacing Reddit with pro-Trump messages | Hacker News Reader

Hackers are defacing Reddit with pro-Trump messages

zdnet.com

31 pointsrbanffy19 comments

> but the large scale of the incident suggests that the intruder(s) might have gained access to a high-privileged moderator or admin account.

The fact that only certain, less-than-top-20 subreddits are affected seems to suggest that it’s just certain subreddit moderators who have been hacked, not actual Reddit admins.

I feel that distinction is important. Aren’t subreddit moderators just regular users anyway who happen to moderate a subreddit?

in particular because apparently very few moderators mod a ton of subreddits. I remember seeing some drama a while ago about some sort of excessively concentrated mod power.

4 users are the moderators of 96 of the top communities.

Of course the same mods took down the post that pointed this out, saying it was harassment.

These 'power mods' have full access to the sub reddit they are moderators of. They can push a post up or down the feed's algorithm , give it as many reddit awards as they wish and perma ban any user.

> They can push a post up or down the feed's algorithm

This is not, and has never been, the case. Moderators can remove posts and ban users, but they cannot affect the scoring or placement of posts (short of pinning up to two posts to the top of the page, which visually distinguishes them from other posts).

The usual mods can't, but the power mods can.

I know it sounds like a conspiracy, but these are trusted users with lots of karma. A normal mod has no power except remove posts and ban users

I have never heard of or seen evidence of this before, and I've been using Reddit for the last ten years.

"Power mods" is a colloquial term used for users who are moderators of a large number of subreddits (especially large ones). It isn't a separate, special status.

With there being so few with that power, I fully expect them to have a special relationship with the admins themselves. From this, it follows that the admins might be very influential if they wish, using these few mods as proxies if the actions might be sensitive.

Your list of things mods can do is totally wrong. Stop trying to get people outraged by parroting misinformation on topics you don't actually know anything about.

That's the kind of behavior that's really ruining the internet, not "power mods".

Assuming the worst is just plain bad journalism.

Like you said, it's most likely a collection of compromised accounts collected over time (hence the odd collection of subreddits).

The article (since updated) now mentions that some of the compromised moderator accounts admit they did not have 2FA enabled.

Its strange that some of these messages are written in Chinese. https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1596820874448-s...

Also some messages instead of saying Donald Trump they used 唐纳德·特朗普 which are the Chinese characters for Donald Trump according to google translate.

Was this done to try to frame China or something? Or would Chinese hackers really use Chinese characters?

This looks like a coordinated usage of previously hacked/compromised mod accounts (as in, not like the Twitter hack).

Here is at least 1 mod saying that is what happened: https://reddit.com/r/space/comments/i5fhd3/_/g0oumkc/?contex...

I'm curious what the goal was here, since the posts they made almost read as satire.

> I'm curious what the goal was here, since the posts they made almost read as satire.

Well, that could have been the goal then?

If the goal was to increase support for Trump I don't think it will accomplish that goal.

Maybe the opposite?

I wonder why they would do that.

Maybe the impact would have been lower if there was a limit to how many subreddits you can be a moderator of? At some point, you might be moderating more than humanly possible.

More like subreddit moderators selling their accounts to the Russians

Are politics like that allowed on here? Doesn’t sound like a good idea. ‘Old Biden was a good man anyway, but be has one confirmed brain aneurism and may have a second, plus we are in a depression that everyone calls a recession (to avoid panic) so doesn’t the final choice have to be Trump Good, Starvation Bad? By the way, there is no way to deface Reddit and Russia are gone-be our BFFs in a Trump second term —Russia plus USA will remind everyone what China rhymes with.

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