Former President Donald Trump’s website was taken over on Monday by hackers who are believed to be from Turkey. On Trump’s site, the hackers posted an Islamic message urging readers to “not forget Allah.”
The Turkish group RootAyyildiz claimed to be behind the hack of donaldjtrump.com, New York Daily News reported.
The hackers’ message, translated from Turkish by the Daily News, stated: “Do not be like those who forgot Allah, as Allah made them forget themselves. They really went astray.”
Newsmax foreign correspondent Alex Salvi shared images of the hack on Twitter.
Trump’s website was back to normal by Monday morning, the outlet reported.
This isn’t the first time Trump’s campaign website has been hacked. In October 2020, hackers posted a message on the upcoming events page of donaldjtrump.com, writing in broken English that the world had “had enough” of “fake news” allegedly pushed by the then-president.
“Earlier this evening, the Trump campaign website was defaced and we are working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack,” Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director, said in a statement at the time, according to CNN. “The website has been restored.”
Murtaugh noted that no sensitive material was stored on the site, contradicting the hackers’ claims that they had accessed “strictly classified” material on Donald Trump.
US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs tweeted at the time, “Like I said yesterday, website defacements are noise. Don’t fall for these attempts designed to distract, sensationalize, and confuse. Ultimately they’re trying to undermine your confidence in our voting process.”
Foreign actors have been hacking American work for at least a decade, President Joe Biden’s administration revealed in July.
According to an alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), between 2011 and 2013, Chinese hackers targeted, and in numerous cases breached, 23 U.S. natural gas pipeline operators in a spear-phishing and intrusion campaign. Of those targeted, 13 were confirmed to be compromised, three were near misses and seven had an unknown depth of intrusion.
“The U.S. Government has attributed this activity to Chinese state-sponsored actors. CISA and the FBI assess that these actors were specifically targeting U.S. pipeline infrastructure for the purpose of holding U.S. pipeline infrastructure at risk,” the alert stated. “Additionally, CISA and the FBI assess that this activity was ultimately intended to help China develop cyberattack capabilities against U.S. pipelines to physically damage pipelines or disrupt pipeline operations.”
The report came months after Eastern European hackers breached Colonial Pipeline Co., disrupting the United States’ largest fuel pipeline and demanding a ransom. Colonial Pipeline ended up paying the hackers a steep price in untraceable cryptocurrency just hours after the ransomware attack.
