{"id":23866,"date":"2025-11-04T01:47:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T01:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/23866\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T01:47:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T01:47:13","slug":"purported-hacker-behind-penns-fraudulent-email-claims-to-have-grabbed-donor-data-in-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/23866\/","title":{"rendered":"Purported hacker behind Penn’s fraudulent email claims to have grabbed donor data in attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

An anonymous person who claims to be behind the fraudulent emails sent from the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Graduate School of Education last week claims to have gotten their hands on much more information than a few email lists.<\/p>\n

The alleged hacker reached out to the cybersecurity site BleepingComputer<\/a> on Sunday. Among the person\u2019s claims:<\/p>\n

They sent the offensive email Friday<\/a> to more than 700,000 recipients.<\/p>\n

They breached several university computer systems and downloaded information on 1.2 million students, alumni and donors.<\/p>\n

The breach was not an extortion attempt, as they were skeptical the university would pay. Instead, \u201cwe can extract plenty of value out of the data ourselves.\u201d The cybersecurity site said that alumni and donors should be wary of unexpected fundraising requests in the near future.<\/p>\n

On Monday, the Inquirer reported<\/a> that Penn had reported the breach to the FBI while continuing its own investigation.<\/p>\n

The email at the end of last week disparaged the university, its hiring and admission practices, and accused Penn of breaking federal laws.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the emails are incredibly offensive and in no way reflective of Penn or Penn GSE\u2019s mission or values,\u201d a message from Penn\u2019s university notification system read. \u201cWe sincerely apologize for the harm this has caused and is causing. Over and above the inconvenience of getting your inboxes spammed, these emails are hurtful and upsetting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Messages from the IT services with Penn\u2019s Annenberg School for Communication, Penn Medicine Academic Computing Services and the School of Nursing also acknowledged the security breach, the Daily Pennsylvanian has reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An anonymous person who claims to be behind the fraudulent emails sent from the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Graduate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2962,227,5962,69,71,70,4347],"class_list":["post-23866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-cybersecurity","tag-education","tag-penn","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-university-of-pennsylvania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}