Donald Trump’s Website Has Been Hacked And Defaced

Somebody hacked into and briefly defaced the of former President Donald Trump on Monday, weirdly embedding a YouTube video of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan onto one of the website’s pages.

The defacement, which popped up on the site’s subdomain dedicated to “Action,” included the following message: “Do not be like those who forgot Allah, so Allah made them forget themselves.” Insert ed into the web page was also a video of Erdogan by which the controversial Turkish leader is seen discussing passages from the Quran, . Pretty weird.

The hack seems to have been carried out by a self-described “hacktivist” who goes by the moniker “RootAyyildiz.” The hacker on Monday that they had been the one behind the defacement, explaining that they’d infiltrated the web page utilizing a Server Side Template Injection, or SSTI—a that enables for remote code execution.

“There are a lot of areas of hacking attacks, for instance, hacking social media accounts or websites, I’m a hacktivist and I’ve been working on websites for a very long time,” the hacker in a Facebook message.

The site targeted by “Root” was by Trump in May, not long after he left office. At the time, the former President had just lately been banished from just about all the key social media outlets (, , and Instagram). Because of this, Trump was casting about for a mouthpiece and wanted to create his own platform where he would have the ability to post anything. However, after the site launched and didn’t garner any real attention on the scale he hoped for, the former president active editorial operations for it and now the site is mainly a hollowed-out campaign shell for a man who’s not actively involved in politics.

Weirdly enough, the same hacker who targeted Trump’s website seems to have for a hack on Joe Biden’s campaign website last November. During that episode, hackers utilizing the same “RootAyyildiz” moniker defaced the then-political candidate’s website by etching numerous statements into the site that appeared to reference American influence in Turkey’s political affairs. A by the National Intelligence Council this past March refers to that prior incident as “hacktivist” in nature—one aimed toward promoting “Turkish nationalist themes.”