- Two US army websites were defaced on their 404 error pages
- The messages included an expletive insult targeting Donald Trump and Tom Barrack
- The messages appear to be written by people sympathetic to the Kurdish cause
Two pages belonging to the US Army had their error pages defaced with pro-Kurdish messages criticizing US President Donald Trump.
Cybersecurity researcher Ronald Lovelace discovered the defaced pages, before notifying both the US Army and Cyberscoop.
One of the messages on a 404 error page read, “FREE KURDISTAN,” while another said “Kurdish sr was here.”
Kurds deface Army websites
One of the pages defaced belongs to the Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (AIIC), and the second belongs to the Army’s Open Innovation Lab (OIL). These sectors of the Army were founded in 2019 and 2020 respectively, with the AIIC working to improve the integration of AI technologies within the Army and train personnel, while OIL established to help test new software and cyber capabilities.
The defaced error messages also labelled Donald Trump a “pedophile & thief,” likely referring to the President’s connections to financier and child sex offender Jeffery Epstein. An expletive message also referenced United States Ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack.
Lovelace noted that the affected websites are hosted using WordPress and Microsoft cloud infrastructure. Numerous WordPress plugins are frequently exploited by hackers to gain control over websites, although how the hackers defaced the Army website still has not been confirmed. The websites have since been taken down.
Who are the Kurds and why are they targeting Trump and Barrack?
The Kurdish peoples are an ethnic group who occupy a stateless nation that covers southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria.
The US and the Kurdish people have worked together on numerous occasions, even being considered allies when it suited the US, particularly in the fight against Suddam Hussein and later against ISIS.
But the US has since turned away from supporting the people of Kurdistan, with the President recently endorsing a Turkish bombing campaign targeting the area of Kurdistan that falls within their territory, hence the messages targeting Tom Barrack.
It appears that whoever is responsible for the defacement of the US Army websites feel betrayed by this shift in policy.
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