In a series of events that future historians will point to as emblematic of our age, NATO—y’know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, established in 1949 to wage Cold War against the Soviet Union—is “actively addressing incidents affecting some unclassified NATO websites” following an alleged intrusion by a group of “gay furry hackers”.

That’s what the alliance tells The Register, anyway, in the wake of a September 30 claim from a hacker group called SiegedSec that it has obtained “over 3 thousand files totaling to over 9GB of uncompressed Data!” after gaining access to six NATO web portals. 

None of those, mind you, are liable to put the codes for the nukes in the hands of anyone untoward (or more untoward than the people who are meant to have them, anyway). We’re talking about sites like the NATO Investment Division Portal, the NATO Standardization Office, and—ironically, given that this is the second time SiegedSec has claimed to have gotten its hands on internal NATO docs—the NATO Lessons Learned Portal.

“NATO: 0 Siegedsec: 2,” wrote the hackers on their Telegram post claiming the breach, boasting that “The astonishing siegedsec hackers have struck NATO once more!!1!!!”

“We tend to have fun breaching intergovernmental alliances between large nations :p,” continued the post, before getting into the details of the sites SiegedSec claims to have hacked and posting a link to a download page for the data the group says it’s purloined.

The SiegedSec Telegram page doesn’t go into much detail about the group’s motivations, but it does proudly say the group is made of “gay furry hackers,” and makes ample use of the “:3” emoji as if to drive that point home.

The group’s claim to have gotten into NATO’s web portals is just one of many on its page. In other posts, the group says it’s gotten into the government web portal for the South African OR Tambo district and “the government servers” from the “Pemalang region of Indonesia.” The group says it “doesn’t really like any government entity,” which might go some way to explaining the motivation for targeting NATO, too.

But NATO is mostly keeping schtum about it, and didn’t tell The Register anything about the validity of SiegedSec’s claim beyond saying it was “actively addressing” unspecified incidents affecting some unclassified websites. 

I’ve reached out to NATO, which is not something I often have to do in my job, and I’ll update if I hear back.

The organisation did say that “Additional cyber security measures have been put in place” and that there hasn’t been any “impact on NATO missions, operations, and military deployments.” So if the bombs start dropping, don’t blame the gay furry hackers.