A Quebec municipality west of Montreal called Terrasse-Vaudreuil was recently the victim of a hack by an Islamic extremist group who called themselves the Middle East Cyber Army (MECA). The home page for the town was replaced for nearly twelve hours by a message with reference to the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine, which read: “We are Muslims. Quran is our book. In Allah we trust. For Allah we work. Screw you Charlie Hebdo.”
Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Helmi Noman was interviewed by MSN, and explained that the “vast majority of the defaced websites have nothing to do with Charlie Hebdo or even France.” He added that the hackers are sending political messages via websites that have poor security, and that an ongoing campaign to deface the Charlie Hebdo website was underway.
This attack comes in the context of a series of online attacks, which have targeted websites with vulnerable security. French authorities reported that 19, 000 websites had faced cyber attacks in the past month, and MECA is thought to be behind many of those attacks as well.
Quebec provincial police, city officials, and the police explained that resident information was placed on a separate server and thus had not been compromised.