'Gay furry hackers' breach conservative US think tank behind Project 2025

Heritage Foundation calls group "degenerate perverts"

A collective of self-described "gay furry hackers" have released 2GB of data lifted from the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think-tank behind Project 2025 - a set of proposals that would bring the USA closer to being an authoritarian state.

The hacktivist group, known as SiegedSec, has been running a campaign it calls "OpTransRights," targeting (mostly government) websites to disrupt efforts to enact or enforce anti-trans and anti-abortion laws.

SiegedSec apparently chose the Heritage Foundation for its Project 2025 plans, which Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump favours.

Project 2025 includes sweeping reforms to consolidate executive power, enforce Christian values across the government and society and remove funding for climate science.

The Heritage Foundation itself has a staunchly conservative view of many items on the political agenda. It is against abortion, LGBT rights and funding for Ukraine, while also rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. It has attracted widespread criticism from progressive and left-leaning groups as a result.

The data SiegedSec has released, reviewed by CyberScoop, comes from a data breach on 2nd July. A group member known as "vio" told the outlet it was released to provide transparency into the Heritage Foundation's funding and support.

The information includes "full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames," including those of users with US government addresses.

SiegedSec also claims it has more than 200GB of additional but "mostly useless" information, which it doesn't plan to release.

For its part, the Heritage Foundation says it was not hacked. It claims the data came from "a two-year-old archive of [Heritage Foundation's media arm] The Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor. The information obtained was limited to usernames, names, email addresses, and incomplete password information of both Heritage and non-Heritage contributors, as well as article comments and the IP address of the commentor."

A chatlog between vio and Mike Howell, a former Trump administration official in the Department of Homeland Security and now executive director of Heritage's Oversight Project, has been confirmed as genuine. In it, Howell threatens the "Closeted Furries" in SiegedSec, saying they will be "presented to the world for the degenerate perverts they are[.]"

He adds, "You cannot hide[.] Your means are miniscule compared to mine."

The rest of the chatlog is significantly less polite.

Earlier this month Twitter/X banned SiegedSec's official account on the platform. Shortly before posting this article, SiegedSec confirmed that it was disbanding, in a "planned move."