On Thursday evening, the Undergraduate Council website was briefly hacked by a group that calls itself “Iran Cyber Security Group” The website was restored by Friday morning by UC Vice President Nicholas D. Boucher.
The outcome of the hack upon visiting the website presented visitors with a cartoon of President Donald Trump being punched in the chin by an individual. The individual’s face was not depicted however it wore a wristband that had stripes on, the color of the stripes were similar to the color of the Iranian flag: green, white and red.
A message on the top read, “DOWN WITH USA”.There were also letters in a foreign language scrolled across the cartoon, visitors were also greeted by music in a foreign language.
The page at the bottom read, “Persian Gulf Forever,” and the page also had hash tags such as #DownWithUSA and “#DownWithEsraeil.” According to the text plastered all across the top page, the hack was done “in the name of God.”
This hack only affected the homepage, which is hosted on a Faculty of Arts and Sciences domain. Boucher claims on early Friday morning that he was unaware of the hack. This was before he was notified by The Crimson.
Almost 10 minutes later, Boucher wrote that he has, “countered their attack” and that he will “work with HUIT to see how they penetrated the Harvard network.”
This hack came only a week after the Council had gathered information of hundreds of students as part of regulation to provide aids to certain SEF-eligible students for storage and transportation. However this information was not submitted to the Undergraduate Council’s website.
Boucher made a statement claiming that the Council is “about” to supplant its current website with “something much better” and “more secure.”
