"Gay furry hackers" claim credit for Heritage Foundation cyberattack

Hacker group SiegedSec, reportedly launched an anti-Project 2025 cyberattack that secured 200GB worth of data

By Nicholas Liu

News Fellow

Published July 10, 2024 2:14PM (EDT)

Podium at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Podium at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

SiegedSec, a collective of self-described "gay furry hackers," claimed credit for breaking into the private database of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the right-wing wish list for Donald Trump's second term known as Project 2025. The group, which opposes Project 2025, posted their scalp on Telegram, announcing that they gained access to the passwords, user information, and "other juicy info" from "every user" of the database, including Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

"Project 2025 threatens the rights of abortion healthcare and LGBTQ+ communities in particular. So of course, we won't stand for that!" wrote SiegedSec. The post also contains a zip file containing the pertinent stolen data.

The Project 2025 dossier, in which Roberts denounces “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology," proposes rescinding protections against sex discrimination, barring transgender people from the military and reversing what its authors call a focus on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”

This is at least the second time hackers breached Heritage's security this year. In April, a cyberattack attributed by Heritage to nation-state hackers forced the think tank to shut down its network; another attack in 2015 stole internal emails and personal information from its donors.

SiegedSec did not claim involvement in any previous attack on Heritage. However, the group has reportedly hacked into other targets it opposes politically, including Israeli companies in stated protest of the invasion of Gaza, as well as churches that it accused of peddling homophobia and transphobia.


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