- Two US Army websites were broken on their 404 error pages
- The messages contained an insult directed at Donald Trump and Tom Barrack
- The messages appear to have been 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 damaged pages before notifying both the US Army and Cyberscope.
One of the messages on a 404 error page read “FREE KURDISTAN,” while another said “Kurdish sr was here.”
Kurds donate army websites
One of the defaced sites belongs to the Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (AIIC) and the other belongs to the Army’s Open Innovation Lab (OIL). These sectors of the Army were established in 2019 and 2020 respectively, with the AIIC working to improve the integration of AI technologies into the Army and training personnel, while the OIL established to help test new software and cyber capabilities.
The defaced messages also labeled Donald Trump a “pedophile and thief,” likely referring to the president’s ties to financier and child molester Jeffery Epstein. An explosive message also referred to the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack.
Lovelace noted that the affected websites are hosted using WordPress and Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. Several WordPress plugins are often exploited by hackers to gain control of websites, although it is still not confirmed how the hackers defaced the army website. The website has since been taken down.
Who are the Kurds and why are they targeting Trump and Barrack?
The Kurdish people are an ethnic group that occupies a stateless nation covering 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, notably 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 authorizing a Turkish bombing campaign targeting the area of Kurdistan that falls within their territory, hence the messages directed at Tom Barrack.
It appears that whoever is responsible for the US Army website scandal feels betrayed by this shift in policy.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds.
