US government's vaccine website defaced with AI-generated content
In Brief
A U.S. government website designed to inform the public about vaccines has been defaced and now hosts apparently AI-generated spam.
The domain, which belongs to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), appears to have been hosting the same kind of content — mostly gay-themed and LGBTQ+ posts — since at least May 12, according to an archived version of the site.
It's unclear who is responsible for it, or what is the purpose of this defacement other than pushing AI-generated slop spam. Websites hosted on official U.S. government domains have been hijacked in the past to host scam ads and hacking services.
404 Media reported on Wednesday that the vaccines HHS website is part of a wider spam operation that includes websites owned by NPR, Nvidia, and Stanford University, all of which redirect to 'a nonsense SEO spam page,' as 404 Media journalist Sam Cole called it, hosted on wowlazy.com.
HHS did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.
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