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FIFA and Sepp Blatter get their Twitter accounts hacked

A group of hackers had their way with the Twitter accounts of Sepp Blatter and the FIFA World Cup for over an hour.

By Kim McCauley
Ian Walton

Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, is a very unpopular man. While he has never been proven guilty of corruption, bribery or anything of the sort, most soccer fans assume he's a less than upstanding individual. Between some sexist comments about women's soccer and his flip-flopping on goal-line technology, it's not hard to find a reason to dislike him even if you think he's innocent until proven guilty when it comes to the accusations against him.

If you do want to dislike Blatter because you're convinced that he and FIFA are corrupt ... well, that's understandable. There has been a constant stream of allegations coming from everywhere imaginable that bribery and collusion lead to Qatar being granted the 2022 World Cup, which, of course, FIFA and Qatar strongly deny.

Some folks who strongly believe that Blatter was directly involved in bribery, leading to Qatar winning their World Cup bid, decided to hack the official Twitter accounts of Blatter and the FIFA World Cup on Monday. The results were amusing. All of these tweets have since been deleted.

Who could be behind all of this? If that second to last tweet didn't give it away...

Yep, it's the Syrian Electronic Army, the same people who took credit for hacking NPR, the BBC's weather feed and a bunch of Twitter accounts affiliated with CBS. Back in 2011, Syria was thrown out of 2014 World Cup qualifying after they were found to have fielded an ineligible player by FIFA. Obviously, the folks at the Syrian Electronic Army disagreed with the decision and don't think their country was disqualified from the competition for legitimate reasons.

Just in case it wasn't terribly obvious, FIFA confirmed that they (and Blatter) weren't responsible for the tweets. Though Sepp Blatter posing as the SEA just for kicks would have made for an interesting story.

FIFA, who have since reclaimed their accounts, will ask their social media managers to use passwords that have at least one letter, number and symbol starting in 2019.

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