Some hours ago, the Twitter account of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) issued a warning of a possible nuclear leak after a couple of rockets hit the Dimona nuclear facility.
The message was in fact the result of the micro-blogging account being accessed without authorization by the members of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacker group, who had unrestricted access to the communication channel.
IDF confirmed the breach and apologized “for the incorrect tweets,” saying that they would “combat terror on all fronts including the cyber dimension.”
Considering the more than 250,000 followers of the IDF account (@IDFSpokesperson), the impact may have been quite strong among them.
SEA claimed responsibility for the incident by publishing proof of the hack, a picture of IDF’s Hootsuite dashboard, on their Twitter feed.
The whole "Israeli army" propaganda was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army #SEA #Syria #Palestne pic.twitter.com/Z1i5uuOzLp
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) July 3, 2014
From the image, it is clear that SEA had control of the account for about 15 minutes, because the group posted a second message, after the one alarming of a nuclear leak (which had already been shared 79 times), claiming the hack.
In case you missed the @IDFSpokesperson hack #SEA #Syria #Palestine pic.twitter.com/8nsk2sGH28
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) July 3, 2014
As soon as the breach was noticed, IDF deleted the tweets posted by the intruders.
We apologize for the incorrect tweets Our twitter account was compromised. We will combat terror on all fronts including the cyber dimension
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 3, 2014
SEA and IDF are not at the first clash, since the hacker group managed to deface IDF's official blog at the end of June of this year and posted official propaganda on the home page.