In an act of cyber vandalism that appeared more embarrassing than destructive, the Twitter and YouTube accounts for US military forces in the Middle East and South Asia were hacked by supporters of Islamic State militants on Monday.

@CENTCOM, the account used by the US Central Command, tweeted out messages threatening attacks on US military personnel and expressing sympathy for Isis. Nearly simultaneously, Central Command’s YouTube channel hosted two pro-Isis videos. Its Facebook account appeared unaffected.



The Twitter avatar used by the command was replaced with an image of a masked militant and the legends “CyberCaliphate” and “I love you Isis.” Tweets included pictures showing US personnel with a goat in a command outpost, suggesting Isis sympathizers had somehow infiltrated military installations.



Compounding the embarrassment for the military was the timing of the hack, which occurred as Barack Obama gave a speech in Washington urging greater identity security for online shoppers, the first in a week of presidential speeches touching on cybersecurity.

Other messages from the “CyberCaliphate” implied that the hackers had captured military secrets, but the documents which were disseminated contained widely available and non-official information.



One of the documents seems to show slides developed by theMIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, a

federally funded research and development centre focused on technology

and national security. The slides appear to outline possible scenarios

for conflicts with North Korea and China.

“American soldiers, we are coming, watch your back!” read one tweet. Another claimed: “Isis is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base.”



Central Command said it viewed the hack as “purely an act of vandalism,” adding that no classified information divulged or operational networks had been affected. None of the documents tweeted by the “CyberCaliphate” came from the command’s servers or social-media accounts, it said in a statement.

It took less than an hour after the hijacked tweets began to appear for Twitter to suspend the account. The Central Command YouTube channel was taken down for “community guideline” violations.



“CENTCOM will restore service to its Twitter and YouTube accounts as quickly as possible,” the command said.

It was unclear how the hackers obtained access. Major Andrew Aranda, a Central Command spokesman, said the command was looking into the cause of the compromised accounts.



A Pentagon spokeswoman, Commander Elissa Smith, said the military was taking unspecified “appropriate measures to address the matter”.



Other military websites and social media accounts, including Centcom.mil, appeared unaffected, with no signs of defacement, traffic overload or data destruction.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest cautioned against comparisons with

the much more destructive hack of Sony. “There’s a pretty significant

difference between what is a large data breach and the hacking of a

Twitter account,” he said.

Central Command, one of the US military’s five regional commands, has been conducting near-daily air strikes against Isis personnel, vehicles, installations and materiel in Iraq and Syria since August. On Monday, ahead of the hacking, it announced 16 new air strikes in both countries in the past 24 hours.

The military strikes against Isis contrasted with the social-media defacement. No US military operations, nor command network, appeared to be affected. Neither is it clear that the Cyber Caliphate has a relationship with Isis, which does not use that English shorthand to refer to itself.

“They seized control of the equivalent of the social media loudspeaker for Centcom,” said Peter Singer of the New America Foundation’s Future of War project.

“The information they posted was frankly rather disappointing. To sound like the equivalent of Simon Cowell, you got control of the Centcom bullhorn and that’s what you posted? A picture of a goat in an office?”

Yet Singer said the vandals had scored a propaganda victory, if not necessarily a substantive one: an announcement that forces claiming sympathy with Isis were able to take brief control of the messaging operations of a powerful adversary.

The US military has engaged hesitantly with online and social media practically from their inception. In the 2000s, service personnel had their ability to blog or tweet sharply curtailed. More recently, though, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, with most US military branches and organizations maintaining an official social media presence.

But Singer argued that the impact of the hack “was a lot like Twitter itself: lots of attention, but no real effect.”

