Alleged U Penn hacker claims they’re in it for money, not ‘primarily “anti-DEI”’

A person claiming to be a University of Pennsylvania hacker says about “1.2 million lines of data” will be kept private so the group can sell them before they go public. The group also plans to publish other documents.

In the comments on Edgethe hackers, or hackers, distanced themselves from previous hacks of other private universities including Columbia University — which were intended to show that the colleges maintained illegal pro-diversity policies. “Our main goal was to obtain a database of wealthy donors,” they said via Signal. They claimed that the email saying: “We hire and admit fools, because we love legacies, donors, and recognizes unqualified affirmative action” was “just fun rant.” The leaked data includes internal documents that appear to be internal university talking points about former university president Liz Magill’s testimony before congress.

Ron Osio, Penn’s head of media relations, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The university said in a statement issued today that it is still investigating the breach and has reported it to the FBI.

In the sample of data provided to Edgewhich appeared to be from a donor database, listed people’s email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and dates of their last donation, along with some other personal information such as religion. Two people have been contacted Edge They confirmed that the information associated with them was private to them.

A post on a site called Leakforum already contains some documents, including one related to Magill. Magill resigned from the University of Pennsylvania after responding to a question about whether “advocating the genocide of Jews” violated the university’s code of conduct and would result in punishment. That would be “context dependent,” Magill said.

“The samples leave little room for doubt: This was not an email spoof,” says Zach Janott, CEO of DataBreach.com. “It reflects real access to internal and confidential Penn materials, including recently created files.”

The alleged hacker said he had data going back “a very long time ago.” They provided a screenshot of a database showing birth dates in the 1920s; They said some people in the system were listed as deceased.

They also said they were looking for “a lot of data on high-net-worth individuals,” or very high-net-worth individuals, “which naturally led us to universities with huge endowments.” They chose Pennsylvania because it was an easy target with a “fairly weak authentication system.”

Among the people whose data the hackers claim was leaked is former President Joe Biden, as well as several members of his family.

The person claiming to be the hacker says he is not affiliated with a previous group of university hacks, which were claimed by a self-described “violently racist” and ideologically motivated hacker. The alleged Pennsylvania hacker says their main motive was financial, and they wanted access to Pennsylvania’s donor data. “Once this was actually leaked, we sent this email as a kind of fun rant since our session was still valid in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud; that wasn’t our end goal,” they said in the Signal message. “A lot of reporting has framed this as primarily ‘anti-DEI’ motives but a) we believe Penn tips the scales in favor of legacies and donors are equally if not more egregious than affirmative action practices and b) neither of those things is why we targeted them.”

said the hacker who took credit for hacking into Columbia University, New York University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Mississippi, and Miami University in Ohio. Bloomberg Their motive was to show that the institutions in question continued to use affirmative action in admissions after the Supreme Court struck it down. Considering the hacker’s actual actions and social media posts, this seems questionable. This hacker, who posts frequently on the social networking site X, has been identified by Curtis Yarvin, the new royal friend of Vice President J.D. Vance.