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Metropolitan Police's Twitter Account Compromised, Here's What Was Posted

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London's Metropolitan Police, headquartered at New Scotland Yard, struggled to stem the flow of bizarre and often offensive messages posted from the force's own verified Twitter account late on July 19.

The official Metropolitan Police Twitter account which has more than a million followers started posting the bizarre series of tweets at 11.16 p.m. and continued to do so every few minutes until shortly before midnight BST.

How bizarre? Well, there were calls to free drill rapper Digga D and a declaration that "Xeon is the best fighter in Scotland." How offensive? Everything from the almost predictable "F*** the police," through to others calling the police "pigs" and the C-word. The same messages also appeared on the Metropolitan Police website .

It appears that Scotland Yard, home to the finest detectives in both fiction and the real world, struggled to prevent the messages from being posted.

Shortly after the tweeting started, Metropolitan Police Superintendent, Roy Smith, tweeted that the force was aware that the account "has been subject to unauthorized access," and went on to confirm that "our media team are working hard to delete the messages and ensure the security of the account."

The official advice from Smith was that the public "should ignore any Tweets until we verify that it is back under official control."

Once control had been regained, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement to confirm that they were "still working to establish what happened," and apologized to followers for the messages they had received.

How did the Metropolitan Police get hacked?

So how did one of the world's most famous police forces get hacked?

The Metropolitan Police's official statement holds the answer it would seem. "The Met Police Press Bureau uses an online provider called MyNewsDesk to issue news releases and other content," it stated, continuing "when a story is published via MyNewsDesk, it appears on the Met's websites and Twitter accounts and generates an email to those who've subscribed to receive our news updates."

From which we can assume that the MyNewsDesk account was compromised, and the Metropolitan Police has said they have "begun making changes to our access arrangements to MyNewsDesk."

The good news is that the Metropolitan Police have also stated that they are confident the only security issue relates to access to that MyNewsDesk account and that there "has been no 'hack' of the Met Police's own IT infrastructure."

I wish I were confident that prominent organizations would use truly random, long, and complex passwords backed up by two-factor authentication to protect all accounts. While I cannot say that this was a password compromise, it certainly bears all the hallmarks of such a thing given the available information.

What did the now-deleted tweets say?

As I've already pointed out, many of the postings used language too offensive to repeat here. However, here's a selection of what was posted:

"what you gonna do phone the police?"

"F*** THE POLICE FREE DA GANG!!"

"FREE DIGGA D ON FONEM GANG"

"XEON IS THE BEST FIGHTER IN SCOTLAND"

"We are the police... -Cal and dylan are gay btw"

"HERE WE F****** GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

"DOXED FAT SKID LOL, HE IS MISSING RT FOR HELP"

The Metropolitan Police investigation

I somehow don't think it will take the police too long to track down the culprits as the tweets themselves were littered with clues that a good detective will be able to follow. From gang names and signatures to the #ChucklingHella hashtag, there are clues everywhere; and it doesn't look like whoever was responsible gave much thought to remaining anonymous.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police are looking to "establish what criminal offenses have been committed."

A MyNewsDesk spokesperson provided me with the following statement: "We have a team that is currently investigating what happened, together with the Metropolitan Police, and we will take the necessary corrective measures."

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Updated July 20, 2019: This post was updated with a statement from a MyNewsDesk spokesperson.

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