Planned Parenthood Hacks: By The Numbers

Planned Parenthood site outage (Planned Parenthood)

Planned Parenthood site outage (Planned Parenthood)

You may have heard that Planned Parenthood’s website got hacked earlier this week. But did you know it got hacked twice?

That’s right. It actually happened twice in one week. Planned Parenthood was first hacked this past Sunday night, and then again on Wednesday. The hacking on Sunday was performed by a group called 3301. The group hacked employees’ personal contact information and internal emails and files. According to 3301’s leader E, the breach was possible due to the organization’s “extremely outdated and broken” coding.

While previously unknown, this group holds some extreme anti-abortion views, and feels that what Planned Parenthood does is “a very ominous practice.” The hacking was prompted by some recent leaked videos showing Planned Parenthood officials “discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue.”

3301 calls its members “social justice warriors.”

The hacking on Wednesday interfered with the organization’s usual flow of web traffic. It was a large “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS), where users couldn’t access the site due to the server getting flooded with voluminous quantities of data.

(And for those who wish I’d write about something else this week: yes, I know I just covered another prominent website’s hacking, but I couldn’t let this one pass by unacknowledged.)

Here are the numbers behind the hacking:

1: day that Planned Parenthood took their own site offline

2: times the site has been hacked this week

2: Government agencies (Department of Justice and the FBI) investigating the data breaches

300: number of Planned Parenthood employees whose personal information has already been leaked

200K: number of people who visit Planned Parenthood’s site daily

2.7M: Number of people that Planned Parenthood helps in a given year