Hackers join the fight to inform the public about Project 2025

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It looks like hacktivists have joined the fight to shine a light on Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for reshaping the government to achieve ultraconservative goals if Donald Trump is elected president in November. Google searches for “Project 2025” have skyrocketed in recent weeks, likely due in part to celebrities, including Taraji P. Henson at the BET Awards last month, drawing attention to the extremist plan. A group of hackers has joined the effort to pull back the curtain on Project 2025. On Tuesday, the cybersecurity news outlet CyberScoop reported that a collective comprised of self-described “gay furry hackers" that calls itself SiegedSec gained access to Heritage Foundation data. Specifically, the collective said it gained access to a website hosting content produced by members of the Heritage Foundation, the organization that assembled Project 2025 with the help of several members of Trump’s former administration. Per CyberScoop: Self-described “gay furry hackers,” SiegedSec said it released the data in response to Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a set of proposals that aim to give Donald Trump a set of ready-made policies to implement if he wins this fall’s election. Its authors describe it as an initiative “to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.” The data, reviewed by CyberScoop, includes Heritage Foundation blogs and material related to The Daily Signal, a right-wing media site affiliated with Heritage. The data was created between 2007 and November 2022. The group says it gained access to the data on July 2 and released it to provide “transparency to the public regarding who exactly is supporting heritage (sic),” a spokesperson for the group who goes by the online handle “vio” told CyberScoop in an online chat Tuesday. A SiegedSec spokesperson who goes by “vio” told CyberScoop that the data the group accessed includes “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associated with Heritage. But a Heritage spokesperson denied that the organization was “hacked,” telling CyberScoop that “an organized group stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of The Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor.” Nonetheless, Heritage folks don’t sound happy about this data dump. The Daily Dot shared excerpts of angry text messages sent from Mike Howell — a former Trump administration official and the executive director of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project — to vio. Howell confirmed the authenticity of the texts to The Daily Dot via X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. No one likes to be targeted by hackers — so Howell’s apparent discomfort with the situation is understandable. But it's unsurprising that openly promoting an authoritarian agenda could draw the ire of many people, including so-called "gay furry hackers."