The Twitter and YouTube sites for the US military's Central Command are back online after being taken over by hackers claiming to support the Islamic State militant group, and Pentagon officials are reviewing some security protocols in the wake of the breach.
Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said today that it is too soon to tell who the hackers are and where they got some of the official documents they placed on Central Command's Twitter feed Wednesday afternoon.
The documents included some personal phone numbers and email addresses and a few slides that were prepared by an independent research group.
The US Central Command covers 20 nations from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, visiting Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, said today that the hack "was a violation, it wasn't a big deal. But it shows you, it reminds you, once again, of how dangerous these different groups are and how capable they are."
The hacker group, calling itself CyberCaliphate, was already under FBI investigation for incursions into the Twitter feeds or websites of media outlets in New Mexico and Maryland, prompting officials to question whether the group has any real affiliation with the Islamic State militants.
The US and other partner nations have been launching airstrikes against Islamic State insurgents and locations across Iraq and Syria since last summer.
The Pentagon called the breaches an annoying prank and said they did not affect military networks or access classified or operational data.
Warren said today the Defense Department has not issued a broad instruction to change or update its password and verification profiles on the social media sites. But he said accounts within the office of the secretary of defense, which includes Pentagon press operations, have made passwords and security changes in more than 50 accounts.
The Defense Department has thousands of social media accounts across all the military services, commands and bases.
