Canadian hacktivists use Donald Trump's website to praise Jon Stewart

The Canadian arm ofan anonymous,decentralized hacktivist groupis taking credit today for sendinga public thank you messagetooutgoing Daily Show host Jon Stewart via Donald Trump's official corporatewebsite.

"We are writing you today via Mr Trump'swebsitebecause, seeming, the only way to get anyone to pay attention any more is to grease a Presidential candidate'swebsite," reads an archived version of a pageon Trump.comentitled"Your Moment of Zen, Mr. Stewart."

Signed by TelecomixCanada, the letter goes on to thank Stewart for his "many happy years of quality journalism and entertainment" on The Daily Show, and to extend aninvitation of sorts.

"Should you ever come to wonder what the stars look like over the North Atlantic on cool clear evening, flag us.Our currency is greatly devalued at the moment," it reads.

The letter also takes aim at some of the candidates in Canada's upcoming federal election.

"Are you aware we have a federal election coming up between a belligerent cowboy Economist, an angry Irishman with a French passport and a young dad with nice hair?" wrote TelecomixCanada.

As ofMonday afternoon, the note could no longer be viewedon Trump.com. It's URL simply redirects browsers to the site's landing page.

Screenshotsandarchived versionsof the lettershowthat ithad beenlive, however, since earlySaturday.

Trump's web host (or "three dollar website people," as TelecomixCanada put it)removed the pageMonday morning as news of its existencestarted picking up steam on Twitter.

TelecomixCanadaprovided more detailsabout the stunt in a newsreleaseuploaded to Pastebinearly Sunday evening.

"Jon Stewart, now in his final week with Comedy Central, is a long time critic of Mr Trump and his views on everything from healthcare reform, to President Obama's citizenship, to John McCain's war record," the group wrote.

The group also made a point ofclarifying that, contrary to some reports, it hadn't "hacked" Trump's website in a malicious way.

"Given the nature of the many diverse Anonymous flags, TelecomixCanada wishes to again stress that no further action was taken against the server (ie data leaking or infection)," reads the release."Nor have they shared access details with other hacktivists or repaired the problems allowing access to trump.com in the first place."

Vocativbacked the notion that Trump's sitehadn't really beenhacked so much as defaced, writingthat itappeared torun on "anold and outdated content management system that isaccessible to the publicand that may stillcontain security vulnerabilitiesnoted as early as2009."

Trump's lawyer dismissed the defacement as insignificant, telling Vocativit was "really weird."

"You know, [hackers] hacked into the Pentagon, for God's sake," he said. "It's unbelievable I'm going to have to reach out to our IT guy and figure out how they got through."