Pierluigi Paganini July 21, 2019

The principal Twitter account of Scotland Yard, which has more than 1.2 million followers, was hacked and tweeted a series of bizarre messages on Friday night.

Hackers took over the Scotland Yard’s principal Twitter account and tweeted a dozen bizarre messages on Friday night, some of the tweets referred to the British rapper Digga D.

Digga D, real name Rhys Herbert, was jailed last year aged 17 along with other four members of his gang after they were caught with baseball bats and machetes, the police discovered they were planning to attack another gang.

The messages were expressing anti-police sentiment and calling for the jailed rapper to be released.

“Free Digga D,” states one of the Tweet. 

Below the message posted by the Met police Supt, Roy Smith after the breach:

London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed that hackers also targeted emails and news pages.

Scotland Yard pointed out that its IT infrastructure had not been compromised, the incident only affected the press office’s online provider, MyNewsDesk. The MyNewsDesk service automatically spreads content to the Met’s website and Twitter account once it is published. It also sends emails to subscribers.

“Unauthorised messages appeared on the news section of our website,” states Scotland Yard. “We apologise to our subscribers and followers for the messages they have received.“

“We are confident the only security issue relates to access to our MyNewsDesk account. We have begun making changes to our access arrangements to MyNewsDesk,” .

“There has been no ‘hack’ of the Met Police’s own IT infrastructure. We are assessing to establish what criminal offences have been committed.”

US President Donald Trump caught the opportunity to attack the London Mayor Sadiq Khan, he retweeted an image of the hijacked Metropolitan Police account.

UK authorities regained control of its account on Saturday.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Scotland Yard, hacking)

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