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

A person claiming to be one of the University of Pennsylvania hackers says that about “1.2 million lines of data” will be kept private for the group to sell before it is made public. The group also plans to make other documents public.

In comments to The Verge, the hacker or hackers distanced themselves from earlier hacks of other private universities including Columbia — which were aimed at demonstrating colleges had maintained unlawful pro-diversity policies. “Our main goal was to get the wealthy donor database,” they said via Signal. An email that said, “We hire and admit morons, because we love legacies, donors, and unqualified affirmative action admits,” was “just a fun rant,” they claimed. Leaked data includes internal documents that appear to be internal university talking points about the congressional testimony of former university president Liz Magill.

Ron Ozio, head of media relations at Penn, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement released today, the university said it is still investigating the breach and has reported it to the FBI.

In a sample of data provided to The Verge, which appears to be from a donor database, people’s emails, phone numbers, addresses, and dates of last donation were listed, along with some other personal information such as religion. Two people contacted by The Verge confirmed that the information associated with them was theirs.

A post on a site called Leakforum contains some documents already, including the one about Magill. Magill resigned from Penn after responding to a question about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate the university’s code of conduct and result in punishment. Magill said that that would be “context-dependent.”

“The samples leave little room for doubt: this was no email spoof,” says Zack Ganot, CEO of DataBreach.com. “They reflect genuine access to internal, confidential Penn materials, including recently created files.”

The alleged hacker said that they have data going “very far back.” They provided a screenshot of a database showing birthdates in the 1920s; some people in the system were listed as deceased, they said.

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

Among the people whose data the hackers claim to have exfiltrated is former President Joe Biden, as well as many of his family members.

The person claiming to be the hacker says they are unaffiliated with a previous set of university hacks, for which a self-described “violently racist” hacker with ideological motives claimed responsibility. The alleged Penn hacker says their main motivation was financial, and they wanted access to Penn’s donor data. “Once that was already exfiltrated, we sent that email out just as a fun rant since our session was still valid in Salesforce marketing cloud; it wasn’t our end goal,” they said in a Signal message. “A lot of the reporting has framed this as primarily ‘anti-DEI’ motivated but A) we think Penn is tipping the scales in favor of legacies and donors is equally if not more egregious than its affirmative action practices and B) neither of those two things was the reason we targeted them.”

The hacker who took credit for infiltrating Columbia University, New York University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Mississippi, and Miami University of Ohio told Bloomberg that their motivation was to show that the institutions in question had continued using affirmative action in admissions after the Supreme Court struck it down. Given the hacker’s actual actions and social media posts, that seems doubtful. That hacker, who frequently posts on the social media site X, has been acknowledged by Curtis Yarvin, the neo-monarchistfriend of Vice President JD Vance.