Hacked Twitter of Indonesian President’s Disaster Advisor Warns of Fake Tsunami

The Twitter account of the Indonesian disaster management advisor, Andi Arief, was hacked yesterday and used to issue a fake tsunami warning.

The message in the screen capture translates to “Jakarta tsunami tomorrow,” which, considering Indonesia has the second largest Twitter user base in the world, was recently hit by a tsunami, and Andi Arief is Indonesia’s disaster management advisor, caused a little panic. To everyone’s relief, Arief regained his Twitter account and let everyone know about the hacking and the lack of actual tsunamis.

Arguably, the most fascinating part of the story is that people would think a government official would issue a warning as important as a tsunami warning through his Twitter account before anywhere else, but interestingly enough, it’d be pretty difficult to ignore something coming from an official, verified Twitter account, right?

This story put me through a range of thoughts:

• This is the world we live in, where people would assume a governmental official would report an impending disaster over Twitter?
• Is Twitter so important and prevalent that this would actually be a valid way to warn of impending disasters?
• Actually, if coming from a verified government official’s Twitter account, a little part of me would be worried, alongside assuming the account was hacked.
• If you take a bunch of disaster movies and throw them into modern times, wouldn’t smartphones and Twitter actually make it much easier for the characters to coordinate and survive?

Oh, the times in which we live.

(story and picture via Mashable)