- Two US military websites were defaced in their 404 error pages
- The messages included an insult directed at Donald Trump and Tom Barrack.
- The messages appear to be written by people who sympathize with the Kurdish cause.
Two pages belonging to the US military saw their error pages defaced with pro-Kurdish messages criticizing US President Donald Trump.
Cybersecurity researcher Ronald Lovelace discovered the defaced pages, before notifying the US military and Cyberscoop.
One of the messages on a 404 error page said: “FREE KURDISTAN,” while another said “The Kurdish lord was here.”
Kurds deface army websites
One of the defaced pages belongs to the Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (AIIC) and the second belongs to the Army’s Open Innovation Laboratory (OIL). These Army sectors 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 the OIL was established to help test new software and cyber capabilities.
The defaced error messages also labeled Donald Trump a “pedophile and thief,” likely in reference to the president’s connections to financier and child sex offender Jeffery Epstein. A rude message also referenced the US ambassador to Türkiye, Tom Barrack.
Lovelace noted that the affected websites are hosted on WordPress and Microsoft cloud infrastructure. Hackers frequently exploit numerous WordPress plugins to gain control over websites, although it has not yet been confirmed how the hackers defaced the Army website. 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 that occupies a stateless nation covering southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria.
The United States and the Kurdish people have worked together on numerous occasions, even being considered allies when it suited the United States, particularly in the fight against Suddam Hussein and later against ISIS.
But the United States has since stopped supporting the people of Kurdistan, and the president recently endorsed a Turkish bombing campaign against the Kurdistan area that lies within its territory, hence the messages directed at Tom Barrack.
It seems that whoever is responsible for the defacement of US military websites feels betrayed by this policy change.
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