Hackers purporting to be acting on behalf of the Islamic State breached the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US Central Command, or CENTCOM – the Pentagon’s presence in the Middle East and South Asia – in the early hours of Tuesday morning, only to post “confidential documents” that are now being reported as easily-obtained and non-official information.
Also, a picture of a goat in an office.
“You’ll see no mercy infidels,” the hacker reportedly wrote in a statement on Pastebin. “ISIS is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base. With Allah’s permission we are in CENTCOM now.”
Per a report in The Guardian, laced so artfully with shade:
“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.”
Wait. Are they – both The Guardian and the hacker – trying to suggest that ISIS are actually goats not dissimilar from the kind pictured above, capable of little more than infiltrating an office on all fours and disseminating widely available and non-official information; chewing through meaningless documents and pooping out nothing of value in return, like asinine photos of goats?
Almost certainly.
However, perhaps the most keenly felt burn of the day belongs to Peter Singer of The New America Foundation’s Future of War project, from whose withering critique no one is spared:
“They seized control of the equivalent of the social media loudspeaker for Centcom. 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? [The impact of the hack] was a lot like Twitter itself: lots of attention, but no real effect.”
At the time of writing, Centcom’s targeted social media accounts are still disabled for having violated community guidelines and terms of use.
Their Pinterest, Flickr and Facebook pages appear to have been spared, which would seem to indicate that the hacker is a teen.
