Sensitive information belonging to donors who made financial contributions to the Canadian Freedom Convoy was allegedly leaked and disseminated online after a targeted hack of the GiveSendGo crowdfunding website.
The Christian crowdfunding website was reportedly hacked Sunday by an unidentified actor in suspected retaliation for its support of the truckers’ convoy.
According to GiveSendGo, no credit card information or funds were stolen, however a collective called Distributed Denial of Secrets that publishes leaked, sensitive data, said it was given donor data including names, ZIP codes, and IP addresses.
Following the theft of the information, visitors to the GiveSendGo site on Sunday night were redirected to a page with a .wtf domain that featured what some are calling a manifesto.
According to a screenshot taken by a reporter for the Daily Dot, an internet culture site, the hacker accused donors of funding an ‘insurrection’ in Ottawa like the ‘January 6th insurrection’ and spreading ‘misinformation’ to ‘burn down democracies.’
GiveSendGo became the Freedom Convoy’s site of choice after GoFundMe cancelled its fund drive in early February and returned money to donors.
The drive purports to collect funds for fuel, food, and shelter on behalf of truckers protesting federal COVID mandates.
Twitter permanently suspended the official Freedom Convoy account last week.
Now Twitter has been criticized for letting the hacked information openly circulate on its platform.
Critics say this contravenes Twitter’s own policy as explained on its website: “we don’t permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking by the people or groups associated with a hack.”
The attack forced a hiatus in collecting donations as the site was taken down while managers recovered it.
GiveSendGo was back up on Tuesday. The organization announced its return by Twitter, only mentioning that names and email addresses were accessed. GiveSendGo said the site was audited for security prior to reinstating service.
Distributed Denial of Secrets said it would share the data with “journalists and researchers” at its own discretion.
Their website says “We don't support any cause, idea or message,” but they do feature the rainbow pride flag in their logo.
The Distributed Denial of Secrets homepage features three GiveSendGo releases, including one with copies of crowdfund creators’ IDs from funding campaigns GiveSendGo has hosted including and in addition to the Freedom Convoy.
Some of the data may have been collected last week from a publicly accessible Amazon S3 storage bucket used by GiveSendGo. Website TechCrunch reported on February 8 that a security researcher found the storage bucket publicly accessible and alerted GiveSendGo.
The identity of the hacking entity itself remains concealed.
