The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is dismissing the hacking of its Twitter and YouTube accounts by an individual or group of individuals pledging their allegiance to the Islamic State of Iran and Syria, an extremist group also known as ISIS or ISIL.
On Monday afternoon, Jan. 12, the hackers took over CENTCOM's Twitter account, publishing a series of propaganda videos, contact information of high-ranking military personnel, and documents claimed to have come from Pentagon's secret coffers. The first tweet was published at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time. It said: "American soldiers, we are coming. Watch your back. ISIS."
The hackers changed the account's profile photo into a black-and-white image of a man wearing a traditional checkered scarf called sa keffiyeh. On the account's banner photo, the words "CyberCaliphate" and "I love you isis" were written over a black background.
"ISIS is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base," one of the tweets said.
"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, the CyberCaliphate continues its CyberJihad," said another.
CENTCOM'S YouTube account was also compromised, with the hackers posting the same black banner and propaganda videos of militant fighters.
Both accounts have been shortly suspended as CENTCOM opted to "look into the incident further." The Central Command, which is the headquarters for the U.S. military campaign waged against the terrorist group, says the hacks had "no operational impact" on its military networks.
"These sites reside on commercial, non-Defense Department servers," said CENTCOM in an official release. "CENTCOM's operational military networks were not compromised and there was no operational impact to U.S. Central Command."
CENTCOM also denies that the hackers were able to get hold of classified documents from its servers or social media websites, and the documents posted by the hackers on Twitter are actually publicly available online. It says it is also contacting defense and law enforcement officials whose contact information were released.
The Twitter account is now back in the hands of CENTCOM, but its YouTube page "has been terminated due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines."
We're back! CENTCOM temporarily suspended its Twitter account after an act of cybervandalism. Read more: https://t.co/hiwvSp3uWt
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) January 13, 2015
The hacking came just as U.S. President Barack Obama was speaking in Washington about cybersecurity and protecting consumers from data breaches.
Josh Earnest, spokesperson for the White House, said the administration is "examining and investigating the extent of the incident" but made it clear there's a "pretty significant difference between a large data breach and the hacking of a Twitter account."
Still, security experts and White House critics believe the compromise of official government accounts should be a cause for concern.
"The fact that they were able to compromise the accounts should force the government to re-evaluate their security policies when it comes to social media," said Ken Westin, senior security analyst at Portland-based Tripwire.
Republican Sen. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says he finds the hack "severely disturbing."
"Assaults from cyber-jihadists will become more common unless the administration develops a strategy for appropriately responding to these cyber attacks," McCaul said.
