Israel Defense Force Twitter Account Hacked By SEA

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacking collective has scored a brief victory over the Israel Defense Force (IDF), successfully hacking its Twitter account.

The SEA used the IDF Twitter feed to post a fake warning that a rocket attack on a nuclear research facility might produce a nuclear leak.

SEA Hack

The SEA posted the following IDF Tweet: “#WARNING, possible nuclear leak in the region after 2 rockets hit Dimona nuclear facility.”

The nuclear facility in question is the Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona. It is thought to be a key research facility for Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

The IDF however reacted quickly and almost immediately deleted the Tweet, but not before the SEA were able to take a screenshot of the hack.

“We apologize for the incorrect tweets Our twitter account was compromised. We will combat terror on all fronts including the cyber dimension,” said the IDF in a follow up Tweet.

The attack comes amid heightened tensions in the region following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers and the apparently revenge murder of a Palestinian teenager.

Online Warfare

But Israel is often a target in the cyber warfare arena, and in the past the IDF has used its Twitter account to live-tweet and blog about military operation against Hamas.

Last month Reuters and various other publications were hacked by the SEA, which has sympathies for the Bashar al-Assad regime.

The SEA has also attacked many US institution. In February it carried out an attack which stole the details of over a million customers of Forbes.com, before later revealing them online.

Prior to that in January, CNN was targeted by the group, with its blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts all hacked by the SEA. The hackers were apparently angered by CNN broadcasting reports containing what the SEA called ‘unverifiable information’ on the current situation inside Syria. The group also recently attacked eBay and PayPal, where users were greeted by anti-US government messages after an attack on the DNS infrastructure serving some customers in the UK.

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