(Please do share this! Let's get people to be smarter about protecting their accounts online).
Here's some breaking news thanks to the online community that covered this quite well and quite fast.
Qatar Foundation's social media accounts have been 'hacked'. People have been saying that it's Assad Supporters Syrian Electronic Army. No they're not a professional organization, it's just some people trying to make themselves sound bigger than they really are.
You want to know what I think? No this isn't the result of a 'hacking' attempt, but more probably (and realistically) the result of poor password protection. (I'll come onto that in a second, but first let's see what the community said).
First off, shout outs to @
nasnas_here , @
DJLedz, @
dohadelivery, @
mufyd_me , @
teampistonbroke , @
YasserM86, and Khalil, for bringing this to our attention and sending us images too.
At around 10:30AM on the 1st of March tweets started coming in that the
Qatar Foundation twitter account was tweeting 'anti-Qatar' posts. Of course the online community, being mostly comprised of intelligent people, quickly realized that this was indeed the result of a hijacker.
This is what people were seeing:
Some people criticized QF for not being quick enough to react, but let's face it. It's a Friday morning. People are either praying, sleeping, with family, or doing the weekend chores. I don't think many organizations have 24hour social media monitoring services. (Although I'm been telling people that they should just pay for the 'Alto' social service, ah well.)
It'll be interesting to see how the Cybercrime unit in Qatar responds. This is the chance for them to help set precedent for online justice.
The big point is though, that this could have been avoided!
ictQatar had put together a great .....
READ MORE: http://blog.iloveqatar.net/2013/03/breaking-qatar-foundation-social-account-hijacked-and-how-it-could-have-been-avoided/
Click the link above to see the storified posts from twitter, images, and full story.
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