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St Anne’s JCR website hacked by pro-Palestinian liberation group

The JCR President said he was seeking advice to make sure it didn't happen again

The St Anne’s JCR’s website has been hacked by a pro-Palestinian liberation group.

The website’s top banner, which originally read “St Anne’s JCR” and “University of Oxford”, said “HaCked by Raiz0WorM” [sic] for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon.

JCR President Tom Mitty told Cherwell: “We’re seeking advice to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Raiz0WorM has previously posted pro-Palestinian liberation messages on other hacked sites.

Other than the banner, the rest of the website is unaffected, meaning that students can still access menus for hall, copies of minutes from previous JCR meetings, and the JCR constitution.

Mitty said: “We are in touch with the company who provide our platform, to see if the technical situation is any more complex than mere changing of text.”

The text was changed again later in the afternoon to read: “St-Annes-JCR”.

The hackers’ previous targets have included a Portuguese consultancy firm, a music festival in Grenoble, and Laugharne Township Community Council.

The hacker has told previous victims to contact them for information about their site

A St Anne’s student told Cherwell: “Obviously it’s worrying. The hacking looks fairly amateurish to be honest, but it’s alarming to think what could happen if a more malicious branch of hackers set their sights on getting in.

“I’m mainly just confused as to why our JCR page would be targeted. I wouldn’t have thought hall menus and tortoise updates would have been top of a hacker’s agenda.”

The hack comes soon after a leading cybersecurity firm found around 200,000 stolen addresses with the ox.ac.uk domain name after trawling the dark web.

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