Gab’s February 19th Outage

What happened?

At 6:09pm EST Gab became aware of several accounts that were posting bitcoin wallet spam and related content. At 6:25pm out of an abundance of caution we brought the site offline in order to immediately assess the situation, solve the problem, and get Gab back online as soon as possible. Because of our quick action zero bitcoin was sent to any of the addresses posted and the affected accounts have been secured.

How many accounts were impacted?

As far as we are aware, fewer than 20 accounts were affected. We have no indication that any sensitive account information was breached or accessed by any unauthorized users. (UPDATE, 2/20/21 – 12 accounts were affected, two of which belonged to Gab. In only one instance was an account e-mail exposed. In the remaining 9 accounts it is conceivable that an attacker could have accessed account information and we will be notifying the accounts in question about this.)

What are you doing about this?

We have identified and patched a security vulnerability in our codebase. Our engineering team is conducting a full audit of our logs and infrastructure. We have also invalidated all active user sessions so users will need to log in again.

As Gab scales, our top priority is keeping your information secure. We will immediately be expanding our security and infrastructure team and launching a bug bounty program.

How You Can Help

If you would like to support this effort to expand our security team we encourage you to upgrade to GabPRO or make a purchase or donation in the Gab Shop. Unlike Big Tech platforms, Gab is funded by people like you. You are not the product being sold, you are the customer being served.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. Gab is scaling to serve tens of millions of people in the biggest mass exodus in internet history.

Our community has been the target of state-level actors, both foreign and domestic, political activist groups and terrorists, and enemies of free speech from around the world for nearly five years.

Their attacks have been relentless, but we have done our utmost to keep Gab safe and online to facilitate the free flow of information. Our determination, grit, and spirit will continue to prevail because of the amazing community of great people who make Gab possible.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
February 19th, 2021
Jesus is King