A mysterious cyber actor hacked into the warship Kidd’s official Facebook page last week and treated visitors to several live videos of them playing the “Age of Empires” video game.
While the live streams have since been removed, screenshots nabbed by your friends at OP show at least three live seshes went down on the Kidd’s page from Oct. 3 to Oct. 4.
“Hahahahaha,” the first post noted at 7:26 p.m.
“Play game,” another livestream caption stated a few hours later at 11:37 p.m.
A third livestream commenced at 5:51 a.m. on Oct. 4.
“POSC,” the hacker wrote, potential shorthand for “piece of sh*t computer.”
“You gotta get out of the stone age, my man,” one commenter suggested as the hacker attempted to build a civilization.
Other commenters suspected the Kidd’s Facebook had been hacked.
“How we practice war in 7th Fleet,” one wrote.
“When my son comes home tomorrow he’s not going to be able to live this down if it’s one of his (sailors),” a mother added.
Kidd is homeported in Everett, Washington, and returned from a deployment to the West Pacific late last month.
Naval Surface Forces spokeswoman Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman told the OP Wednesday that the ship’s command informed higher-ups of the page hack on Oct. 3.
Officials notified Facebook, but Schwegman said the social media leviathan’s response was hobbled by the historic Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outages of Oct. 4, when the platforms were offline for roughly six hours.
“Due to their own technical difficulties, it took them longer than usual to respond,” Schwegman said in an email. “Once they were back online (late in the day Oct. 4th), Facebook secured the page.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Schwegman said the command was not aware of any other recent hacks.
Such command Facebook pages are usually administered by the chain of command, and officials said they are unaware of any personal pages of the Kidd page admins getting hacked.
The Kidd hack comes as the Navy and other services have hammered home the need for folks to secure their socials.
“Social media is an integral part of the strategic communications and public affairs missions of the Department of Defense,” a Navy website states. “Cyber attacks are a real and present threat to cybersecurity of government social media accounts.”
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Still, the services have been no strangers to the type of social media account hacks that normally plague your Aunt Phyllis.
Several U.S. Central Command social media accounts were hacked back in 2015, with the bad guys posting Islamic State material and threats against U.S. troops.
Other times, what appear to have been hacks were just derpy user errors.
Special Operations Command Central’s Twitter appeared to be hacked back in April when the words “Afghanistan” and “Islamic State” were tweeted out.
The command initially said their account had been hacked, but later corrected course and noted that the admin “inadvertently tweeted the words while conducting a search for current topical events.”
Geoff is the managing editor of Military Times, but he still loves writing stories. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.
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