The Will to Troll
Lou Cornum Interviews SiegedSec
The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Idaho Falls, Idaho conducts research on nuclear science, nuclear engineering and “national security research.” In November, 2023 its cyber walls were breached by a group of digitally-coordinated cats. From within the stores of precious radioactive servers a hacker named mewmrrpmeow cooed to their Telegram followers: “meow meow meow meow meow meow meow [...] woah so much crunchy data :3” mewmrrpmeow was a part of hacker group SiegedSec. Before their recent inactivity s, the INL hack was one of their splashiest. With the ensuing slew of headlines reminiscent of grocery tabloids x WIRED magazine, SiegedSec went from hacker forum heroes to the world’s trans furry hacker.
The trans furry hacker is one of the novel subjects of our age. They live and find each other at the merging social collectives of queer sexuality and cybercrime. The trans furry hacker I spoke to has held in equal measure the practice of being a furry (a member of a fandom enthusiastic about the imagined lives and worlds of anthropomorphic characters) and being a hacker (someone with the skills and knowledge to breach and manipulate computer systems). While the non-furry public is often fixated on the fursuits with a sense of pornographic innuendo, it seems much of contemporary furry life occurs online. The trans furry hackers’ curious demand bridged these realms of digital and more material furdom. In exchange for the data they held ransom, SiegedSec wanted INL to conduct research on “IRL catgirls.” Furries of the future are hacking the nuke lab to hack the species…that is if we take them seriously.
Each generation produces its own anti-heroic hacker collective. In the early ’70s, Yippies were overriding payphone signals to snag free calls. Underground knowledge of the sort continued to proliferate in photo-copied manuals, message boards, and zip files. In 1995 the movie Hackers, set in a downtown built for rollerblading VR gamers, introduced androgynous high-school hackers with names like Acid Burn and Zero Cool in crop tops and leather jackets taking down a fraudulent oil company in battlefield cyberspace. At a screening last summer, 2024, in Ridgewood Queens a group called the Videpunks presented their re-mixed re-scored version of Hackers, which I discovered mid-event was also at the kickoff for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly's biennial HOPE ("Hackers of Planet Earth") Conference taking place at St. John's University that same summer weekend. The conference has been going on since 1994, taking place on even-numbered years though recently going annual, and their name seems to have influenced the vague but rousing call the movie ends on: Hack the Planet.
SiegedSec is from a different universe of hackers. They certainly aren’t the semi-professional “white hats” (see below) peopling panels in university classrooms to present on the future of cybersecurity. When they reference the call to hack the planet it is as such, “g4y furr135 4r3 h4q1ng th3 p14n37”, in the middle of a message delivering files of NATO data to their followers. That telegram message makes explicit the hack had nothing to do with the war in Ukraine and ends with the sign off “*purrs cutely* enjoy these NATO documents :3” Though there is no defined , an anti-authoritarian tendency in SiegedSec is obvious. And we might get a whiff of their aims and desires from the list of organizations and governing bodies they’ve targeted with cyberattack: The Heritage Foundation, Australian software company Atlassion, Fort Worth Texas and Nebraska Supreme Court (for legislative actions against trans people), Bezeq an Israeli telecommunications company, Murphy Oil Corporation, and of course the INL and NATO. Most persistently and coherently across their years of activity though was the will to troll.
SiegedSec began in part to make a hacking community that was “more open to lgbtq and furry individuals.” This has in turn shaped their sense of mission. Operation Trans Rights, which focused on disrupting states banning trans healthcare, endures as their greatest chain of victorious hacks. All hacks also had the effect of revealing security issues and data vulnerabilities, in SiegedSec cases particularly in the healthcare system. The group is more likely to state their goal as raising awareness and eliciting lols, even just their own, than advancing any particular political program. Their methods are anarchic; their results scattershot but always spectacular. The attacks are determined by calls from the followers and the impulses of the hackers themselves. They seize upon a political imaginary of outlaws in the worlds so many of us spend so much time in without any sense of control or capacity to act, to intervene. The trans furry hacker breaks into reality, cracking the world of transphobic lawmakers and settler nation-states with freaky swag (non-derogatory). Like many hackers they are also concerned about It is undeniably pleasurable to see the humiliation of their targets, exposed and brought down by the ones that the straights never took seriously.
It was eventually through a YouTube channel by user @cybercrimecat that I located a contact within SiegedSec. Their bio claims they are a leader of the group and there are just four videos posted under their channel, all breakdowns of different SiegedSec hacks, some appearing to be reposts of another YouTube streamed show Security Weekly News. I could not confirm the identity of the person I chatted with over Signal for several days as definitively a member of SiegedSec let alone a leader. If they weren’t and the whole conversation was a ruse, then they are as adept as the ones they imitated in pulling off a good troll.
SiegedSec disbanded sometime in the last year. But the age of the trans furry hacker has hardly been cut short. In January, 2025, a hack on the publisher Scholastic was claimed by a hacker Parasocial, an unaffiliated yet implicitly related traveler to the SiegedSec crew. Parasocial summed up the general motivations for the massive breach of eight million people’s data (mostly belonging to Scholastics customers and educational contacts in the U.S.) as boredom—and none of the data was shared publicly—and signalled one of their loyalties in a shout-out amidst the breach to the “the puppygirl hacker polycule.”
If the irl catgirls and this puppygirl hacker polycule ever get together, the trans furry hacker could seize the means of internet sociality and take us all to a post-pilled planet filled with wondrous, lol-loving trickster creatures where murderous states have no power.
LC: I’d like to begin with hearing a little about how you got involved with siegedsec and how a group like this comes together. I’m curious how people find each other and find a common cause. Do gay hackers seek each other or are there just a lot of gays already hanging around hacker forums and such?
CCC: sounds good :D
to start with how siegedsec came together, i first started siegedsec around February 2022. i met the 4 other original members in hacking group chats, and we all wanted to start a group for the fun of it.
with the exception of myself and another member, the original group didnt really have anyone who was lgbtq or a furry. we were more of a typical blackhat hacking group at the time, but we soon decided to rebrand into gay furry hackers for three reasons:
1) it would be funny to see it in the news
2) as members joined and left, we found it fitting to our member's personalities to embrace the gay furry hacker image.
3) the hacking community i was involved with wasnt friendly, especially to lgbtq and furry individuals. i wanted to create or find a more friendly hacking community that was more open to lgbtq and furry individuals.
nowadays we've found a more open and friendly hacking community. as our image of gay furry hackers became more popular, it attracted new members who are also lgbtq.
What does blackhat mean? It sounds serious but I’m also picking up that your group is a lot about having a good time and making friendly communities to hang out with like-minded people in. And making jokes! Are other black hat hackers so funny?
blackhats are hackers who have malicious intentions. for example, financial gain, causing chaos, or just having fun. most blackhat groups arent like SiegedSec, most of them take things seriously and are focused towards making money, and we're the exact opposite.
currently, SiegedSec is a mix between blackhat and greyhat. we hack for fun but we also often hack with good intention, like hacking for trans rights or hacking to secure hospitals.
I learned about your group from the hack of the nuclear lab, the Idaho National Laboratory, and the demand for catgirl research. I thought it was hilarious but I’m also critical of the nuclear industry in this country so on that level I also thought it was an interesting move. I would love to hear more about the trans rights and healthcare actions you have done. How can hacking help on these fronts? And how do you all make decisions together about what issues you want to focus on?
hacking can help in several ways, lets use SiegedSec's Operation Trans Rights as an example.
we carried out attacks on states banning trans healthcare, our goal was to raise awareness, force the state to take notice of concerns, and ideally inspire others to help protest. i believe we succeeded, and although the laws arent changed, we raised a lot of awareness, the state was forced to address the breaches and acknowledge the motive, and we noticed a lot of people inspired and encouraged by the "gay furry hackers swooping in to help."
and with hacking to secure hospitals, our most recent example is our BrightStar Care breach. we've accessed 80GB of patient data however instead of leaking it, we fixed the vulnerability for them and we left notes to explain to them how to secure their data in the future. despite past breaches, our moral stance on breaching healthcare changed, and we want to ensure healthcare data is secured.
as for how we make decisions on what issues to focus on, our members are often activists before joining the group. so when we find a cause we believe in, we're very open to discussing it with the other members to decide if we should do something about it as a group.
another way we find and decide on an issue to take action on, is through the public requesting it. we recognise our audience consists of lgbtq and furry individuals, and we care about the issues they bring to us. we recieve a lot of requests to take action on various issues, and we try to take action on what get most requests.
one specific example of this is with our Operation PAVE, when we took action against sponsors of a bill that may include lgbtq content as "harmful content" towards minors through the PAVE act. the idea for the operation came from many requests to take action on it.
People are definitely excited by the idea of gay furry hackers swooping in. Your operations opened up another arena of intervention I hadn’t thought of in a long time. Everybody in the political circles I’m in has some awareness of digital security but not about how to use digital infrastructure as a tool against our enemies. A lot of us also feel skeptical about the legal system as effective channel for protection let alone change in the United States. So other tactics are compelling. Alongside the massive backlash to trans people over the past couple years, what are other issues that connect or are also important to the group? For instance, with the nuclear lab, how did that decision come about? And what kind of specific requests are you seeing a lot of these days?
with the nuclear lab, that was fully for the fun of it :D we didn't attach any real motive to it aside from having fun. there wasnt even much discussion around the nuclear lab between the members. we knew it was a big hit but we didnt put much thought into how we published it, we didnt even think of demanding catgirls until the very last moment before publishing it.
issues that are important to us share a common denominator—we take interest when it involves authority using their power against marginalized groups.
from our early hacktivist operations protesting Roe v Wade overturning, to OpTransRights, to OpPAVE, we care a lot about authority figures using their power wrongfully.
these days we see a lot of requests relating to Oklahoma's furry bill threatening animal control, law enforcement being homophobic or transphobic, as well as regular requests to carry out a second Operation Trans Rights (and we're strongly considering a second run of the operation ;D).
One of the things obviously that gets people's attention about your group is the proud furry identity. Can you talk more about that? Are you a furry and has that always been a big part of your hacker identity as well? Is a lot of furry culture also online?
ah yeah, ive been a furry for many years. its always been a part of my hacker identity, although it was very subtle in the beginning as i wasnt sure on how i wanted to present myself yet. i really started showing it more as siegedsec began embracing the furry hacker image.
a lot of furry culture is online, which explains its reputation in technology fields. despite this reputation, there arent as many furry hackers as i hoped there would be. hopefully siegedsec can inspire more furries to come into hacking :D
That would be a very cool development. How do people get into hacking?
people get into hacking usually for the thrill, fame, the love for hacking, political reasons, or financial gain. many hackers start out as teens with unrestricted access to the internet which leads them to communities of cybercriminals.
personally, i got into hacking initially for political reasons, but it slowly transformed into thrill, fame, and being passionate for cybersecurity.
What were your political reasons when you first started hacking? What is your or the group's vision of how the world could be made better by gay furry hackers, not just in the short-term but thinking of your ideal world?
my initial reason for starting hacking was to try to add another layer of protest for political figures to make changes to how law enforcement handles issues. i initially joined the Anonymous collective for these reasons, but left soon after.
our ideal world improved by gay furry hackers would be for hackers to have more of an effect on the world and people to be more accepting of the lgbtq community.
hopefully if we protest and hack for the rights of people, change will happen. and with lots of media exposure to this, it might help change minds over how they perceive the lgbtq community.
additionally with hackers having more of an effect, with hacking hospitals, spyware, and widely used services, we can hopefully bring light to the people's privacy at risk.
I just have two practical questions to end on: where did the SiegedSec name come from and how big is the group?
the name SiegedSec was created by the co-founder. at the time we were aspiring to be similar to the hacking group LulzSec with the motto "Laughing at your security," we wanted a similar motto, "Sieging our victim's security." we havent used the motto much, nowadays i dont like it anymore.
for operational security reasons i can't reveal the exact count of members, however we're a small tight-knit group.
Note: This conversation took place in February 2024 over Signal between Pinko editor Lou and the person claiming to be the head of SiegedSec. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. The original punctuation and style of the respondent’s text has been kept.