On June 25th, Brookhaven Town’s website was hacked by a group calling itself Team System DZ which claims to be representing the terrorist group ISIS. This group is a so-called “hacktivist” group that has repeatedly has been banned from various social media sites for posting propaganda videos and other activity in support of the Islamic State.

This hack was part of a larger event that affected other government sites including the official site of Ohio Governor John Kasich and the official site of Ohio First Lady Karen Kasich as well as The Rhode Island Department of Education and Howard County, Maryland. The hack also touched several other townships in New York including Highlands, New Windsor, and Cornwall.

As is usual with these types of hacks, the actual technical details are rather mundane. All of these sites were running a content management system known as DotNetNuke (DNN). This platform is popular with a lot of smaller governments because it runs on their existing Windows Servers and uses the ASP.NET framework for Microsoft Internet Information Server. All of these sites were running outdated versions of this soft which had a known vulnerability which was discovered in May of 2016 and fixed in updated versions in June of 2016.

For those of you who may be concerned, Babylon Village’s ancient website uses static HTML files instead of a modern content management system and can not be hacked in this way