Although it may seem to be rather humorous, hacking a Twitter account and sending out phony tweets as if they were from the party you hacked can be a rather serious issue. It’s embarrassing for the target, potentially offensive tweets can open up the target to lawsuits and other legal problems. Last week, it was the Associated Press account that was hacked to broadcast the false story of an explosion at the White House. That tweet sent stock prices on a short nose-dive until it was deemed false.
This week the targets included the British Broadcast Company, the Human Rights Watch and France 24, a leading French news organization. The group claiming responsibility for the hacking is known as the “Syrian Electronic Army”. They used the accounts at BBC, specifically the Weather feed to being posting odd messages. One message showed support for Syrian President Assad while the other was warning residents of Haifa of an imminent tsunami, advising them to return to Poland.
The Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of young people whose political goal is to counter what they consider false information about the Syrian uprising. The way they are getting their message across is through hacking social media accounts of major news organizations and sending out tweets or posts of an unusual nature.
BBC has since regained control of their Twitter account, removed the tweets and apologized to their followers with a message informing them of the hacked account and with an apology and an assurance that the people at BBC were working on resolving the issue. Rest assured, however that the professional hackers of the Syrian Electronic Army will not quit hacking until they get their message across to the masses. Hopefully BBC has learned something from this incident.
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