Twitter and YouTube accounts for the U.S. military's Central Command were hacked on Monday, and pro-ISIS messages were posted by the unknown hackers before the accounts were taken down for hours.
CENTCOM said the sites were "compromised" for about 30 minutes. "These sites reside on commercial, non-Defense Department servers and both sites have been temporarily taken offline while we look into the incident further. CENTCOM's operational military networks were not compromised and there was no operational impact to U.S. Central Command," CENTCOM said in a statement. "CENTCOM will restore service to its Twitter and YouTube accounts as quickly as possible. We are viewing this purely as a case of cybervandalism."
Hackers who gained control of the Twitter account replaced CENTCOM's banner and profile images with images from the “CyberCaliphate,” one of which read “i love you isis.” The hackers posted tweets in which they claimed to have broken into U.S. military computers and extracted information about service members and their families. Twitter said that it does not comment on individual accounts, but that the company was helping the Pentagon resolve an "account security issue."
Defense officials said that none of the information posted was classified, however, and that some of it was out of date. Slides posted by the unknown hackers that purported to show plans involving China and North Korea are not military and some of them were produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the officials said. "This is clearly embarrassing, but not a security threat," one Department of Defense official said. The hack came the same afternoon President Obama spoke to the Federal Trade Commission about the importance of corporate cybersecurity and protecting consumer data.
Just after 10 p.m. ET, CENTCOM's Twitter account tweeted, "We're back!" with a link to a press release on the incident.
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