A US military Twitter feed appears to have been hacked by people claiming to be sympathizers of the Isis militant group.
In a disturbing demonstration of the vulnerability of the American government’s cyber networks, a group claiming association with the Islamic State gate-crashed the Twitter account of Central Command, also known as CentCom, and began posting internal information including personal details of retired senior officers.
Identifying themselves as the Cyber Caliphate, the infiltrators seized Central Command’s Twitter account at about 12.30 pm eastern time on Monday and began posting assorted messages including threats to US military personnel. They said the hacking operation was part of a so-called ‘CyberJihad’.
Among messages seen by anyone following the account was, “AMERICAN SOLDIERS, WE ARE COMING, WATCH YOUR BACK. ISIS”. As well as posting direct messages and threats, the group used the incursion to post images of documents containing what appeared to be sensitive Pentagon information as well as links to other sites where more information was available for download.
However it wasn’t clear if those documents had been stolen as a result of an earlier, successful hack into Pentagon servers or if they were in fact already publicly available. A US Defence Department official told Reuters that nothing in the trove of information being made available was classified.
