cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24720114
SiegedSec, a collective of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” has claimed credit for breaching online databases of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that spearheaded the rightwing Project 2025 playbook. On Wednesday, as part of string of hacks aimed at organizations that oppose trans rights, SiegedSec released a cache of Heritage Foundation material.
In a post to Telegram announcing the hack, SiegedSec called Project 2025 “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.” The attack was part of the group’s #OpTransRights campaign, which recently targeted rightwing media outlet Real America’s Voice, the Hillsong megachurch, and a Minnesota pastor.
In his foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, rails against “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The playbook’s other contributors call on “the next conservative administration” to roll back certain policies, including allowing trans people to serve in the military.
“We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for,” one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle vio, told The Intercept.
Full text, because the site is that bad:
SIEGEDSEC, A COLLECTIVE of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” has claimed credit for breaching online databases of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that spearheaded the right-wing Project 2025 playbook. On Wednesday, as part of string of hacks aimed at organizations that oppose transgender rights, SiegedSec released a cache of Heritage Foundation material.
In a post to Telegram announcing the hack, SiegedSec called Project 2025 “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.” The attack was part of the group’s #OpTransRights campaign, which recently targeted right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice, the Hillsong megachurch, and a Minnesota pastor.
In his foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, rails against “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The playbook’s other contributors call on “the next conservative administration” to roll back certain policies, including allowing trans people to serve in the military.
“We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for,” one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle “vio,” told The Intercept.
In its Telegram post, SiegedSec said it obtained passwords and other user information for “every user” of a Heritage Foundation database, including Roberts and some U.S. government employees. The remainder of more than 200GB of files the hackers obtained were “mostly useless,” SiegedSec said.
The Intercept reviewed copies of files provided to the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. They included an archive of the Heritage Foundation’s blogs and a Heritage-aligned media site, The Daily Signal, as of November 2022.
This is at least the second hack against the Heritage Foundation this year. In April, Heritage shut down its network following a cyberattack tentatively attributed to nation-state hackers. SiegedSec targeted the Heritage Foundation in early June, according to vio, who denied involvement in the earlier attack.
A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation declined to comment on the breach.
SiegedSec’s other recent operations have targeted NATO and Israeli companies to oppose the war in Gaza.