Around 3:35 p.m. GMT, the Twitter handle of Newsweek began broadcasting exteedingly violent messages The banner image read ‘Je suIS IS’, a warped deviant of the original ‘Je Suis Charlie’, a phrase that emerged in the wake of the ghastly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last month.
A prominent feature of the hack was the apparent death threat to United States President Barack Obama, addressed to his wife Michelle Obama:
The organization identified itself as “Islamic State CyberCaliphate” and proclaimed a long cyber campaign to take out what it called ‘US Cyber Army’.
The Managing Editor of Newsweek, Kira Bindrim, confirmed the hacking of the twitter handle:
“We can confirm that Newsweek’s Twitter account was hacked this morning, and have since regained control of the account. We apologize to our readers for anything offensive that might have been sent from our account during that period, and are working to strengthen our newsroom security measures going forward”.
Such attempts at hacking and defamations have been undertaken by ISIS ‘cyber-army’ in the past and just a month; ISIS took hold of United States Military Central Command (@CENTCOM).
Newsweek removed the ‘fabricated’ posts an hour after they were posted as the officials of the organization caught up with the fact that their Twitter handle had gotten into wrong hands. The profile picture and the banner image were removed at once.
