Monday, September 20, 2010

Somebody hacks the French Foreign Ministry's Tweets; now vacancy for two Web 2.0 project managers

Via France 24:

The Twitter account of the French ministry of foreign affairs was the victim of cyber-piracy on Thursday, sending thousands of subscribers a hateful message about Roma people.
Usually more concerned with problems of dwindling resources and influence, the French ministry of foreign affairs had an altogether different problem to solve on Thursday: a hacker’s embarrassing post on the ministry's official Twitter account.

The tweet, the name for a short text posted on the micro-blogging website Twitter, was written in English and strongly insulted Roma people.
[...]
At 8:23pm local time, after being online for around an hour, the message disappeared and was replaced with a less offensive tweet (translation of the message pictured in this article): “The account @francediplo has been hacked. We have deleted the message. We will take steps to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Unfortunately for the foreign affairs ministry, the cyber-attack had already been viewed by 46,448 people who follow its Twitter thread.
[...]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the website 20minutes.fr reported spotting a classified ad put out by the beleaguered ministry: "Two 2.0 Web project managers needed immediately."

Read the whole thing here.

Not the first time they had problems with the internets, with a more elaborate  hoax perpetrated just a couple months ago.













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