A U.S. authorities web site designed to tell the general public about vaccines has been defaced and now hosts apparently AI-generated spam.
The area, which belongs to the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies (HHS), seems to have been internet hosting the identical form of content material — principally gay-themed and LGBTQ+ posts — since at the least Could 12, according to an archived version of the site.
It’s unclear who’s liable for it, or what’s the goal of this defacement apart from pushing AI-generated slop spam. Web sites hosted on official U.S. authorities domains have been hijacked previously to host rip-off adverts and hacking companies.
404 Media reported on Wednesday that the vaccines HHS web site is a part of a wider spam operation that features web sites owned by NPR, Nvidia, and Stanford College, all of which redirect to “a nonsense search engine optimization spam web page,” as 404 Media journalist Sam Cole referred to as it, hosted on wowlazy.com.
HHS didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.