Multiple BBC Twitter accounts, which include weather, Arabic and other feeds were taken over by Syrian regime supporters.
It has been confirmed by Chris Hamilton who is the social media editor for BBC news that their twitter feed was indeed hacked.
This hacking is only the latest event to happen to corporate Twitter accounts.
The BBC has confirmed that is back in control of all of its accounts as of last Thursday by about 3 pm which is when all the inappropriate/fake tweets were removed.
The attacks were initiated early Thursday morning; during this time a phishing email had been sent to several BBC staff which could have exposed password details.
Social engineering
These attacks are the latest to happen in a series taht has seen Burger King, Chrysler and other high profile twitter accounts get hacked.
"The most likely source of the hack is via social engineering - someone managing to elicit the password by fooling the user who keeps the password," Professor Alan Woodward of the department of computing at the University of Surrey stated.
Due to all these hacks that are occurring industry experts are calling for Twitter to beef up their security and offer two-factor authentication.
Thankfully this latest hack doesn't seem to have used BBCs brand name to get users to click on malicious links or sign up for any type of scams, instead being a hack done by the Syrian Electronic Army for spreading political messages about Syria.
Remember, you should always use unique passwords for any of your online accounts that are both hard to guess and hard to crack, so they should be at least 8 characters long and contain numbers, special characters, and alternate capitalization. The password should also be unique to that specific online account and not be used for all your accounts.
For more information on network security and support, check out Iconic Mind.
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