Recently, the Twitter account of NBC national correspondent Peter Alexander appears to have been hijacked by hackers claiming to represent Turkey’s “cyber army.”
For at least a half-hour Sunday morning, Alexander’s Twitter account was filled with such tweets: “Mr. Trump, we will tear down blood vessels of those who are hostiles to TURKIYE. Be wise and learn about Turkish people in history”, reports the Washington Post.
Similarly, another Tweet says: “Turkey was born again on July 15, 2016, while we are planning to destroy with FETO and coup attempt. Now we are trying to do with the economic crisis. You remember how did we destroy Iraq with lies? TARGET TURKIYE, LAST CASTLE STANDING.”
Alexander’s account was littered with images and videos in support of Turkey and showing Erdogan.
The Twitter account of Alexander lost its verified blue check mark after the hackers added a “v” to his Twitter handle, changing it to @PeterAlexanderv.
In a bid to praise Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the hackers had taken over the social media handles of several United States journalists. Journalists from the publication like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Fox News are targeted by the hacktivists. The incident was notified to CNBC by cybersecurity intelligence firm, Crowdstrike.
Form a few time back some high-profile social media accounts, predominantly of journalists, have been hacked by Turkish-speaking attackers.
Attacking on the social media account of a journalist provides political benefits. By hacking the social media account of media personality attackers can propagate their political stance and agenda before a larger crowd of the audience, states ciswoman.
The accounts of reporter Elizabeth MacDonald from Fox, Tom Keene from Bloomberg and Vanessa Friedman from the New York Times has also been taken over.
Lately, Tom and Elizabeth had made a report about Turkey’s economic condition, but Vanessa Friedman hasn’t written anything about turkey, she majorly covers the story on fashion and trends.
Alexander appears to be the latest media personality to have been hacked by Ayyildiz Tim. In January, the group took over the Twitter accounts of two former Fox News personalities, Greta Van Susteren and Eric Bolling, and filled their feeds with similar propaganda, according to New York magazine.
Snopes claimed that the same group also briefly hijacked the Twitter accounts of India’s top envoy to the United Nations and Borge Brenda, president of the World Economic Forum, the attackers have used a similar method and with similar messaging.
