A swath of high-profile Twitter accounts appear to have been hacked after they all posted the same message supporting the Turkish President in his diplomatic row with the Netherlands and Germany, with hashtags reading "NaziGermany" and "NaziHolland".
The messages, which also included swastikas and were written in Turkish, appeared on accounts such as Amnesty International, BBC North America, Forbes Magazine, the UK Department of Health, and the European Parliament on Wednesday morning.
The tweets described the hack as a "little Ottoman slap" and added "see you on April 16", referring to the date of Turkey's referendum to grant more powers to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The tweets, posted on Wednesday morning, end with: "What did I write? Learn Turkish."
A four-minute video attached to the tweets begins with an Erdoğan speech in which he says: “If we’re going to die, let’s die like men.”
It then features scenes from various speeches by the Turkish President, starting with his showdown with then-Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos in 2009, as a campaign song chanting his name, “Recep Tayyip Erdoğan", plays in the background.
A spokesperson for Twitter said they are "aware of an issue affecting a number of account holders".
They continued that Twitter "quickly located the source which was limited to a third party app. We removed its permissions immediately".
Many of the hacked accounts appeared to have taken back control soon after the incident, with many tweeting explanations.
Good morning. We briefly lost control of this account earlier, but everything is now back to normal.
— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) March 15, 2017
A third-party analytics app called Twitter Counter appears to have been compromised, allowing hackers to send out tweets from anyone using the software.
The company tweeted to say they were "hacked", but have "taken measures to contain such abuse".
0 comments: