U.S. Central Command's hacked Twitter feed. Yahoo/AP
Key U.S. government Twitter and Youtube pages were hacked by Islamic extremists. Yahoo/AP. Although no connection to ISIS has been found, the hacked pages posted propaganda in support of the organization. The U.S. Central Command's English and Arabic Twitter page, along with their Youtube page, were hacked. The hacker posted threats against U.S. soldiers and posted unclassified but sensitive information. The hacker or hackers called themselves the CyberCaliphate and warned U.S. soldiers that they were "watching them". U.S. officials called the attack an act of vandalism.
My Comment:
As of this post the U.S. CENTCOM twitter is back to normal. They issued a press statement that can be found here.
Sounds like CENTCOM needs a better password for their Twitter feed... This isn't a major incident and it seems like most of the information was publicly available anyways, but it is still disturbing that they were able to pull this off. It's probably just a troll with too much time on his hands, but it is showing a weakness that really shouldn't exist. Plus it is a propaganda victory for ISIS, even if they have nothing to do with it. Either way it made the United States look stupid.
This also tells me that the United States could do better at training their people about how to keep a password safe. I won't speculate about what method this hacker used but whatever it was it should have been known to the government. I guess someone could have had a temporary breach of procedure but it is so important for the government to not make these kinds of mistakes. They have to be right every time, the terrorists only need to be right once. This attack did no real damage but the next time we might not be so lucky.
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