They probably didn’t decide to hack Freecycle ahead of time. Rather they likely probed a ton of sites and found that this one was vulnerable to their hack.
Large data sets are valuable. And many people who hack are primarily motivated by the challenge, so targeting a site isn’t always a vendetta. Unfortunately sometimes hackers stumble across these things and are motivated by money too, because they’re human like the rest of us.
Can someone help me understand why they were targeted in the first place? Maybe to get location+email address in aggregate?
They probably didn’t decide to hack Freecycle ahead of time. Rather they likely probed a ton of sites and found that this one was vulnerable to their hack.
Large data sets are valuable. And many people who hack are primarily motivated by the challenge, so targeting a site isn’t always a vendetta. Unfortunately sometimes hackers stumble across these things and are motivated by money too, because they’re human like the rest of us.