Hackers threaten to leak data after hacking the University of Pennsylvania to send mass emails

On Friday morning, Penn State alumni, students, staff and community members received several emails from hackers claiming to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE).

“We have terrible security practices and are completely untrustworthy,” the email said. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will be leaked).”

This message was sent from a variety of different Penn email accounts, such as GSE, as well as allegedly coming from several senior faculty members across the university.

Other Penn affiliates received the email multiple times from different senders with an administrator @upenn.edu Email addresses. (Disclosure: As an alumna and former university employee, I have received the message three times now on my personal email.)

Penn spokesman Ron Osio told TechCrunch in an email on Friday that the school’s incident response team is “actively addressing” the situation.

“A fraudulent email that appears to be from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education has been circulating. This is clearly fake, and nothing in the deeply offensive and hurtful message reflects the mission or actions of Penn or Penn GSE,” Osio said.

As the hackers clearly stated in their message (“Please stop giving us money”), the motive behind this hack appears to be to suppress alumni donations. The hack also comes shortly after the university publicly rejected a White House offer to make commitments aligned with the Trump administration’s political agenda in exchange for federal funding. Penn and six other schools rejected the White House proposal.

The White House-approved Charter for Academic Excellence in Higher Education calls on universities to eliminate affirmative action in recruiting and admissions, and to discipline administrations that “punish, belittle, and even provoke violence against conservative ideas.”

Signatories to the agreement will also be required to freeze tuition fees for five years, offer free education to students pursuing the “hard sciences,” cap international university enrollment at 15%, and require standardized tests such as the SAT for admission.

The agreement also stipulates that schools implement policies that marginalize transgender and gender non-conforming students.

“[The compact] Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson in his response to Education Minister Linda McMahon, which was posted on the university’s website: “Preferences and protections are imposed for communicating conservative thought only.”

“One-sided conditions run counter to the diversity of viewpoints and freedom of expression that are fundamental to how universities contribute to democracy and society,” Jameson wrote.