FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Hackers Target Planned Parenthood

User databases and emails were dumped as the organization’s site was attacked for the first time.
Image by Clinton Nguyen

Happy Monday! Everything's getting hacked. The latest: Planned Parenthood, the non-profit organization for reproductive health.

The site was breached last night by the hacker group 3301, named after Cicada 3301, the enigmatic internet organization dedicated to nigh unsolvable cryptographic puzzles. The group dumped a zip file containing some 113.4MB of databases, which they say they've obtained through a blind database injection, according to The Daily Dot.

Advertisement

The group also published a list of employee emails with encrypted passwords on their homepage. The passwords are currently encrypted and "heavily salted," giving users another layer of defense before their password can be decrypted.

"The actions of this 'federation' are not seen as right in the eyes of the public. So here we are, the social justice warriors, seeking to reclaim some sort of lulz for the years and thousands of dollars that Planned Parenthood have wasted and made harvesting your babies," the group's homepage reads.

The group stopped short of getting the salts for the passwords, claiming that the content management service that Planned Parenthood's site ran on was heavily outdated, locking them out from the file system.

While Planned Parenthood protesters are more known for their picketing (at lengths extreme enough that lawmakers had to create buffer zones to safeguard people entering and leaving), this is the first we've seen of conservative-leaning hackers attempting to breach the organization's systems.

Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment.