Two websites run by the U.S. Army were defaced by hackers on Monday with messages attacking President Donald Trump.
The websites, oil.army.mil and ai2c.army.mil, displayed messages referring to Trump as a “pedophile and thief” while also criticizing U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack. The phrase “FREE KURDISTAN” was prominently featured.
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The messages appear to refer to Trump’s friendship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while the attack on Barrack could be related to his recent support of a Syrian military campaign to take control over territories that are Kurdish majority.
The U.S. Army was notified of the hacks by independent security researcher Ronald Lovelace, who also informed CyberScoop, the first media outlet to report on the incident.
CyberScoop notes that the defacements were made possible due to what’s known as a 404 hijacking attack. Such an attack, CyberScoop reported, “exploits a website’s error-handling system — often by compromising a plugin, content management system, or server configuration — to control what content gets displayed when a page isn’t found, rather than breaching the site’s core pages directly.”
Websites remain offline
The websites were taken offline after CyberScoop contacted the U.S. Army. The websites remain offline as of Tuesday morning.
“We are aware of unauthorized defacements on the error pages of oil.army.mil and ai2c.army.mil, which are hosted on a legacy, non-authoritative platform,” Army spokesperson Maj. Sean Minton told CyberScoop. “Technical teams took immediate action to mitigate the issue, and the affected pages have been secured. The Army takes all cyber incidents seriously and is actively investigating this matter to enforce our strict cyber defense and network security standards.”
It remains unclear who exactly was behind the attacks. The defacements included the statement “Kurdistan sr was here,” although no further details were provided. The U.S. Army has said it is investigating the matter.
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