Pierluigi Paganini
March 15, 2017
A huge number of high-profile Twitter accounts have been hijacked following the recent diplomatic crisis between Turkey and the Netherlands.
The hackers posted through many Twitter accounts political messages in the Turkish language including a link to a YouTube video showing Turkish president Erdoğan.
The messages include the hashtags #Nazialmanya (Nazi Germany) and #Nazihollanda (Nazi Netherlands). Among the high-profile accounts hijacked by the hackers, there are the ones belonging to the several organizations, including Amnesty International, the European Parliament, Duke University, UNICEF USA, Forbes, Reuters Japan, and BBC North America.
The majority of the organizations have already restored their Twitter accounts, and some cases they have informed their followers about the hack.
Earlier this morning our Twitter account was hacked. We've now deleted the hacked tweet and investigating what happened. Apologies & thanks
— Amnesty International (@amnesty) March 15, 2017
The messages were also posted from the Twitter accounts of hundreds of random individuals.
The hackers defaced the compromised accounts with an image of the Ottoman Empire’s coat of arms.
The massive hacking campaign comes a month before the referendum in Turkey that is scheduled for April 16. The referendum is related to the president’s powers.
The tension between the governments rose after The Netherlands’ decided to prevent Turkish ministries from speaking at expatriate Turks.
“Turkey said on Monday it would suspend high-level diplomatic relations with the Netherlands after Dutch authorities prevented its ministers from speaking at rallies of expatriate Turks, deepening the row between the two NATO allies.” reads the post published by the Reuters.
“The sanctions – which include a ban on the Dutch ambassador and diplomatic flights from the Netherlands but do not appear to include economic measures or travel restrictions for ordinary citizens – mark another low point in relations between Turkey and the European Union, which it still officially aims to join.”
The hackers exploited a flaw in Twitter Counter, a stats and marketing analytics application that is used by more than 2 million users and tracks over 350 million Twitter accounts.
Security experts are suggesting to revoke TwitterCounter app permissions in order to prevent Twitter account being hacked.
https://twitter.com/thecounter/status/841941624238284800
The TwitterCounter service declared that it doesn’t store login credentials for Twitter accounts or payment card information.
https://twitter.com/thecounter/status/841936613752094721
As usual, let me suggest to enabling two-factor authentication and choose a strong password to avoid being hacked.
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(Security Affairs – CounterApp hacked, Turkey)
