A member of British Parliament has warned his Twitter followers against opening any direct messages delivered in his name after finding his verified account compromised Friday.
“My account was briefly hacked this morning by someone tweeting in Turkish,” Labour MP Chuka Umunna wrote on Twitter early Friday, London’s Evening Standard newspaper first reported.
“[I] have deleted the tweets, please ignore them,” tweeted Mr. Umunna, 39, Streatham’s representative in Parliament since 2010. “If I follow you and you have been DMed a link supposedly from me, please do not open it. Thanks.”
Twitter did not immediately return a message seeking comment, though the company typically doesn’t comment on individual accounts.
Screenshots captured of Mr. Umunna’s Twitter account prior to his regaining access Friday show that his profile was hijacked to display images and messages to his roughly 280,000 followers touting a pro-Turkey group credited with similar stunts in the past.
“Your account has been hacked by the Turkish Cypriot army Ayyıldız Tim,” reads an English-translation of a since-deleted tweet sent by Mr. Umunna’s account early Friday. “Your DM correspondence and important data have been captured!”
“Operation in Afrin, I support Turkey!” reads another deleted tweet sent from his account alongside a photograph of a Turkish soldier.
Ayyildiz Tim has previously been credited with defacing in 2013 the websites of the United Nations Country Team in Ethiopia, Kenya’s Ministry of Transport, and the Facebook page of a Kurdish LGBT group, Hebun, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a nonprofit press-monitoring and analysis group that tracks online extremists.
Messages touting the same Turkish group were tweeted last month by hacked accounts belonging to at least two Indian politicians and Anupam Kher, a popular Bollywood actor with roughly 12 million Twitter followers at the time of the breach, regional media reported.
Ayyildiz Tim’s mission is to “bring the spiritual identity of the Turkish Republic State to the place it deserves among the nations of the world by carrying out counter-propaganda operations,” MEMRI reported previously.
Hackers have proven in the past that considerable damage can be caused by compromising a single Twitter account. In 2013, for example, pro-Syrian hackers breached The Associated Press’s official Twitter account and tweeted, “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.” The AP regained control to the account and retracted the tweet minutes later, but not before the stock market tumbled significantly as a result.
Mr. Umunna did not immediately return an email seeking further comment.
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