Hacker Hijacks and Defaces Countless Subreddits Just for Fun

A black hat hacker has been taking over random subreddits, removing moderators, and changing the subreddit's CSS style, leaving a defacement message behind.

Going on Twitter by the name BVM (@TehBVM), the hacker has been recently tweeting out a storm of links to subreddits it managed to deface.

Hacked subreddits: Battlefield, Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones

The list includes popular subreddits such as /r/StarWars, /r/GameOfThrones, /r/Pics, /r/Books, /r/Cars, /r/Gay, /r/Battlefied, /r/LosAngelesRams, /r/Arrow, /r/MarvelStudios, /r/Marvel, /r/Autism, /r/CSGOBetting, /r/OutOfTheLoop, /r/Robocraft, /r/HowToHack, r/TIFU, and even the recently created /r/Battlefield_One.

On most subreddits, the hacker left a message with "Jacked by @TehBVM Shoutout to [3-4 other Twitter accounts]"

If you're wondering why this happened, you can find a clue on BVM's Twitter account. On May 4, BVM tweeted out a link to an article where another hacker had defaced the subreddits of four professional gaming teams: TSM, CLG, Team Liquid, and Cloud9.

That hacker, @TheVoxi, left a defacement message similar to the one above, in which he left a shoutout to BVM.

It appears that BVM took inspiration from this incident, and then decided to do the same. For the past week, BVM has been on a rampage and has been hijacking subreddits from their moderators, and leaving his mark behind.

BVM is probably reusing leaked passwords from public data breaches

The hacker tweeted out that he doesn't use brute-force attacks to crack mod passwords, and some mods have come forward and admitted to using weak passwords on multiple sites.

The most obvious explanation is that BVM is using cracked passwords from public data breaches, cross-referencing moderator names and trying to see if some of the leaked passwords work on Reddit.

Because Reddit doesn't support two-factor authentication, the only defense moderators have against BVM is to use a unique, strong password.