The information of the donors who contributed to the Ottawa truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest has been leaked after hackers targeted the crowd funding website GiveSendGo, according to reports. The database of 92,845 donors of the campaign is no longer available on the website.

Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), a non-profit leak website, said that it had received 30 megabytes of information including names, email addresses, ZIP codes and IP addresses of donors of the Freedom Convoy protest from the GiveSendGo website. The website said that the donor information contained sensitive personal information. Thus, it would not be making the data public and would only offer it to “journalists and researchers”. DDoS describes itself as a non-profit organisation, devoted to enabling the free transmission of data in the public interest.

VICE News reviewed the copy of the data. It reported that some donors did not provide their names, but a vast majority had done that. The notable name is of American software billionaire, Thomas Siebel, who donated $90,000 to the Freedom Convoy protest.

Extremism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam also analysed the data and found that a majority of donors were from the United States (56 percent) and Canada (29 percent). Thousands of donations came from overseas from countries including the UK, Australia and Ireland. In terms of the amount of money, US donors contributed approximately $3.62 million while Canadian donors brought in $4.31 million.

The GiveSendGo donor data was just leaked. What does it say about where the money is coming from?

Of the 92,844 donations, 51666 (56%) came from the US, 36202 (29%) came from Canada, and 1831 (2%) came from the UK. The top ten donor countries are here: pic.twitter.com/m3KIWWAT9L— Amarnath Amarasingam (@AmarAmarasingam) February 14, 2022

The fundraising website GiveSendGo, which was used to raise millions of dollars for the Freedom Convoy went offline after reports of a possible hack.

The Washington Post reported that, on February 14, a screenshot of the GiveSendGo website featured an image from the Disney film Frozen that had a ticker showing the e-mail addresses and donation amounts of people who donated to the movement. The image read, “GiveSendGo is now frozen”, and a link describing raw donation data was displayed.

Shortly after, the image was replaced with “We are currently offline for maintenance and server upgrades. We are continuing to improve our platform to ensure it will be the best fundraising platform on the internet.”

At the moment, it is not clear who is responsible for the alleged hack. However, on Feb 5 GiveSendGo did confirm on Twitter that it was being targeted by online attacks.

The leaked data appears to include email addresses, IP addresses, zip codes, as well as names (although some users could have used fake names).

— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) February 14, 2022

We have been under heavy DDOS and bot attacks. In spite of all of this we still have managed to raise funds 5X faster than the gfm did. GFM raised 10mil in 3 weeks. GSG campaign has already raised over 1.1mil in just over 12 hours!

— GiveSendGo (@GiveSendGo) February 5, 2022

Earlier this week a state emergency was declared in Ottawa as protesters blocked streets with trucks. According to the local police, about 1,000 vehicles, 5,000 protesters and at least 300 counter-protesters had clogged city streets, reported Techcrunch.com.

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(Edited by : Thomas Abraham)