Taiwan "Embassy" Twitter Gets Hacked
Guest Contributor: Ross Feingold
China In Arms BOOKSTORE and GIFT SHOP!
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe: $5 Month/$50 Annual (unable to secure a subscription contact the bank for permission for Stripe deposits).
1 December 2022
Taiwan "Embassy" Twitter Gets Hacked
Guest Contributor: Ross Feingold
Note to Reader: This commentary was originally published in the China Times. Those interested in Taiwan cyber security issues see this post on China In Arms.
To view ALL of the Twitter hacks, the Screenshots are included at the end of this post.
Cognitive Warfare or Simply Hacked?
@RossFeingold
Ross Darrell Feingold is a lawyer and political risk analyst in Taipei, and the former Asia Chairman, Republicans Abroad.
While searching Twitter for news about Taiwan recently, the Twitter account of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Brunei Darussalam appeared in my Twitter feed. For reasons unknown, the profile photo is the logo of the Ripple payment system, and, mixed with re-tweets of Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) tweets, are tweets about cryptocurrency.
The account has a blue check mark, though Twitter’s blue check mark system has had its problems after Elon Musk took over the company.
Whatever the actual situation is, for it to continue at least ten days based on the publicly available tweets, makes this author wonder whether it can be included among the latest security failure at the agencies responsible for Taiwan’s national security and foreign relations.
At the National Security Bureau (NSB), earlier this year details of a trip taken by Director General Chen Ming-tong (陳明通) to Thailand were leaked, including his photo taken at the Bangkok airport immigration counter and the invoice of charges he incurred at his hotel in Bangkok. At the Ministry of National Defense (MND) Political Warfare Bureau (PWB), there was also a leak of eating and shopping details of Director Chien Shih-wei’s (簡士偉) trip to Hawaii. Recently, after a military officer was indicted by prosecutors for receiving bribes from China, the MND PWB was criticized because prosecutors, rather than the PWB, discovered the case.
This follows other incidents in recent years. Members of President Tsai Ing-wen’s protection detail cigarette smuggled in to Taiwan, when accompanying the president on overseas trips. A former (MND) Military Intelligence Bureau director allegedly helped a friend’s daughter pass the bureau’s entrance exam.
Last December after Nicaragua de-recognized Taiwan over China, even after accepting US $100 million in cash aid from Taiwan, the ambassador to Nicaragua failed to return to Taiwan and it was discovered he had become a Nicaraguan citizen. Financial defection?