Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Scotland Yard Twitter and Emails Hacked

London’s Metropolitan Police apologised Saturday after its Twitter, emails and news pages were targeted by hackers and began pumping out a series of bizarre messages.

London’s Metropolitan Police apologised Saturday after its Twitter, emails and news pages were targeted by hackers and began pumping out a series of bizarre messages.

After a series of messages late Friday that read simply “test” or seemingly random letters, the police sites began using foul language with anti-police sentiment and calling for a jailed rapper to be released.

“Free Digga D,” said one such message. 

The Met Police’s Twitter account has 1.22 million followers.

Scotland Yard police headquarters said its internal IT infrastructure had not been hacked, explaining the issue was limited to its press office’s online provider, MyNewsDesk, which put news releases online to the public.

“Unauthorised messages appeared on the news section of our website,” it said, as well as on its Twitter feed and emails.

“We apologise to our subscribers and followers for the messages they have received.

“We are confident the only security issue relates to access to our MyNewsDesk account. We have begun making changes to our access arrangements to MyNewsDesk,” it said.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

“There has been no ‘hack’ of the Met Police’s own IT infrastructure. We are assessing to establish what criminal offences have been committed.”

US President Donald Trump weighed in, reigniting his long-running war of words with London Mayor Sadiq Khan while retweeting an image of the hijacked Metropolitan Police account.

“With the incompetent Mayor of London, you will never have safe streets!” he tweeted.

Drill music artist Digga D, real name Rhys Herbert, was jailed last year aged 17 along with four other members of his gang, after they were caught with baseball bats and machetes on their way to attack rivals.

The drill genre of rap music, which often features masked or hooded groups of men talking about guns, drugs and stabbings, has been linked to a rise in violent crime in the capital.

Besides his jail term, Herbert was given a three-year criminal behaviour order restricting him from making music with violent lyrics.

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.