The hacktivists, which describe themselves as made up of “gay furry hackers,” usually target government orgs whose policies they disagrees with, and have a flare for political publicity stunts, also posted a link to the purported stolen files on their Telegram channel.
“The astonishing siegedsec hackers have struck NATO once more!!1!!!,” the crew wrote, bragging: “NATO: 0. Siegedsec: 2.”
The team is referring to its earlier NATO intrusion in July, during which it claimed it swiped information belonging to 31 nations and leaked 845MB of data from the alliance’s the Communities of Interest (COI) Cooperation Portal.
Not as unlikely as you might think given that 80%+ of the fandom is queer and most are techy, and furries tend to clump together in communities. I do think it’s a bit of a bizarre target to claim a fandom affiliation for though, since their opinions are not representative of the fandom by a long shot.
It seems to me like it might be a smokescreen to hide their identity and motives. It could also be to redirect retaliation towards a group they don’t like, but mostly it just makes the fandom look badass so I don’t think that would be a very good plan. My gut feeling is that it probably is genuine, but there are reasons to be skeptical.
I think the smokescreen part is spot on.
I do believe mostly on the smokescreen theory, maybe they don’t even hate furries and are just using it as a mask, or not all members are furries but one or more KNOWS that bringing “Gay Furry” onto a headline will get most of the attention out of all the group. Either that or they really just wanna brag themselves, which wouldn’t be out of character for furries.