Oh, this is so not good. It appears as if ISIS, or someone claiming to represent ISIS, has been able to hack CENTCOM’s Twitter account.
This all happened while President Obama was giving a speech about…. cybersecurity.
https://twitter.com/JimmyPrinceton/status/554692392553832448
The Twitter account has now been disabled, but the YouTube account is still up.
Screen shot of an ISIS propaganda video currently hosted on the CENTCOM youtube page: pic.twitter.com/cF7W1uRvco
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) January 12, 2015
Obama was planning on making cybersecurity part of the State of the Union speech. I think it just became a much bigger part. Hacking Twitter and YouTube has been done before, and those aren’t government-run platforms. But if any of the documents tweeted out by the hackers are legitimate, we are in a world of hurt.
GWB says: Some are now saying the youTube channel is down, too.
Also, the documents might not be as serious as originally thought. For example, the one listing “personal information” is really a list of office information, and might not be current. This might be a lot of sturm und drang over nothing.
And, yes, there are still people in DoD who do stupid crap like not reset the default password on their accounts from something like pwd123. Personally I think those people should be given nothing but a potato peeler and sent out on a lone mission to capture or kill an ISIS leader. /rant
GWB, whatever happened, it is not good. The cyber world is getting hijacked all over the place: major stores, credit cards, government sites…this is not the first time a government site has been hijacked and lost some serious material (think Snowdon), and China & North Korea crack us regularly. The cyber world is like Swiss cheese!!
GWB says: Except it isn’t a government site that got hacked. It’s a government-run account on a commercial social media site. There doesn’t appear to actually have been any hacking of government computers involved in this, nor any loss of actual protected information.
Yes, there is hacking going on all the time, all over the place. But this isn’t a good example of it.
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