All you people out there buying up the macho supplements that conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Alex Jones hawks may have unintentionally imperiled your data. A Dutch security researcher found malware on the Infowars store website that was able to record user payment records, according to ZDNet.
Researcher Willem de Groot reportedly found the malware infection about two days ago. He discovered it using a scanner he built to detect any sort of bad behavior happening atop the Magneto e-commerce platform. ZDNet informed Infowars about the issue and the site says it fixed it. Alex Jones told the news site that “only 1,600 customers may have been affected.”
The Infowars store is an infamous digital destination, known for selling products that promise vague things like “male vitality,” “alpha power,” and “the real red pill.” As Quartz pointed out, these products, which generally are herbal supplements that have not been proven to have any healing qualities, are along the same lines of what Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sells–albeit, to a very different clientele.
Over the last year, the podcast and online video show–which have long been known for disseminating all sorts of conspiracy theories–have been de-platformed; Alex Jones was banned from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, PayPal, as well as other sites. And this tech backlash has reportedly led to his audience cratering. Even Amazon–a company known for refusing to take a political stand–stopped recommending Infowars’ products.
It would seem that selling products directly on the site is one of the only reliable ways for Jones to bring in revenue–and now, it seems, even that was hampered. For now, Jones tells ZDNet that the problem is fixed.
So instead of chancing their data privacy, those buying Infowars’ products are merely putting their bodily health at risk.
You can read the full report here.
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