How the CENTCOM Twitter account appeared after being hacked.
Zack Beauchamp
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. Before coming to Vox in 2014, he edited TP Ideas, a section of Think Progress devoted to the ideas shaping our political world.
Hackers claiming to be affiliated with ISIS have taken over the Twitter feed and YouTube account of US Central Command, the US military command responsible for the Middle East. The hackers used the Twitter feed to disseminate official US military documents, which they portrayed as stolen classified documents, although in fact many of the documents are public and come from sources other than the US military.
The hackers call themselves the CyberCaliphate, and claim to operating "under the auspices of ISIS." It's not yet clear whether they've actually hacked CENTCOM in any meaningful way. So far, as Blake Sobczak notes, they have yet to tweet any actually classified documents. Some of of what they've tweeted, like a map of North Korean nuclear facilities, appears to have been taken from non-government sources. And the YouTube channel is just publishing ISIS propaganda.
The CENTCOM Twitter account has been suspended. Here's everything it tweeted: