An anti-abortion group has claimed credit for hacking Planned Parenthood.
The leader of the hacktivist group claiming responsibility, who goes by “E,” told the Daily Dot that the group obtained data such as employees' email addresses by hacking Planned Parenthood databases on Sunday night. The group plans to release all the information sooner rather than later, E said.
The hack was motivated by the edited videos that surfaced this month showing officials from the group discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue to tissue-donation programs, in a casual (and some would say callous) fashion.
"Trying to mold an atrocious monstrosity into socially acceptable behaviors is repulsive," E told the Dot. “Obviously what [Planned Parenthood] does is a very ominous practice. It'll be interesting to see what surfaces when [Planned Parenthood] is stripped naked and exposed to the public.”
Dawn Laguens, a top Planned Parenthood official, said in a statement to CNN that the organization was investigating the breach.
"Anti-abortion extremists are willing to do anything to stop women from accessing the reproductive health care they are seeking," she said. "Extremists have broken laws, harassed our doctors and patients, produced hack videos, and now are claiming to have committed a gross invasion of privacy—one that, if true, could potentially put our staff members at risk."
Planned Parenthood CIO Tom Subak said that the organization was previously unaware of a breach in their systems—because its security system never flagged a problem.
"Every organization will have people against it, and now those people have the means and mission to disrupt them or steal their data,” said Ziften vice president of product, Mike Hamilton. “Leveraging existing blind spots, cyber-criminals have easy access through vulnerable endpoints and use them as a point of entry to conceal their activities, evade detection, exploit the network and victimize the targeted organization. It is now more important than ever for organizations to be able to see suspicious behavior beyond the network, and certainly beyond simply their web server."