“The Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US Central Command were easy to hack because the military was using simple passwords, a senior administration official said Tuesday,” Geoff Earle reports for The New York Post.
“The official did not disclose the passwords,” Earle reports, “which were quickly changed after hackers claiming to be affiliated with ISIS terrorists took over the accounts and threatened military personnel.”
Brief article in full here.
MacDailyNews Take: KeystoneCops?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related article:
‘ISIS’ hacks U.S. military social media accounts – January 12, 2015
Western civilisation is clearly in safe hands.
Well, these are the clowns that want to keep us safe by requiring unencrypted communications and back doors in everything.
Imagine them running around checking for mines by drilling holes below the waterline then wondering why the ship sank…
Joshua? (War Games — http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/)
There is no such thing as a safe social media account.
Next question: Why the fsck is our government wasting time on social media?
Because vast majority of online audience below 40 years of age today gets their news and information via Facebook and Twitter (rather than traditional web sites).
If you want your PR information to reach your audience, you put it on FB and TW. It is the reality of today’s world.
The main advantage is that FB and TW allow you to push your information to your audience (rather than hope they google you and find your web site). Once you have built a strong base of followers, the size of your audience begins to grow organically (as people “like” and “share” your FB posts, or “favourite” and “retweet” your tweets). Social media has proven as infinitely more efficient medium for outreach and PR than traditional web (or any other medium, for that matter).
Wonder if the CENTCOM password was the same as this?!?
People act like hackers got the nuclear launch codes. It’s likely a lot of people had access to these social media accounts so they could post updates.
Most likely using passwords like war, death, thermonuclear, torture, waterboarding and of course god.
No doubt very patriotic passwords but passwords those from the civilized free world would never think of using.
Yup! Figures! Told you so! Aren’t I smart for figuring #MyStupidGovernment was stupid! Predictable! Ad nauseam…
I’d soooo like to say ‘unbelievable!’ But it’s not.
Script kiddie level dictionary attack–> OH NO! 😯 💩😴💩😴