US President Barack Obama’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were hacked and used to promote a video, which depicts the atrocities committed in Syria by the rebels, the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group said.
“All the links that Barack Obama’s account tweeted and posted on Facebook were redirected to a video showing the truth about Syria,” a SEA spokesperson wrote in an email to Mashable website.
The altered links on the US president’s accounts led to a graphically violent 24-minute YouTube video, entitled ‘Syria facing terrorism’.
“Obama doesn’t have any ethical issues with spying on the world, so we took it upon ourselves to return the favor,” the SEA wrote on Twitter.
According to Mashable, the Syrian hackers didn’t actually compromise Obama’s social media accounts, but changed the links in the posts by tampering with the URL shortener service for BarackObama.com.
The group appears to have hacked the electronic address one of the administrators of the website, which Obama used in his presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, to gain access to its control panel.
The links on Obama’s Twitter and Facebook pages have been currently fixed.
White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, refused to comment on the issue during his media-conference on Monday.
The initial attack on BarackObama.com took place on Sunday as it began redirecting the users to the SEA’s page.
The Syrian Electronic Army is a hacking group, supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad, which became famous in recent month after defacing the websites and Twitter accounts of many prominent media outlets, like AP, AFP, BBC, New York Times and others.