October 19, 2023
A cyber-security, Kevin McSheehan has reportedly hijacked a Telegram channel used by the CIA to recruit spies, exploiting a glitch on the agency’s official Twitter account.
McSheehan, a 37-year-old ethical hacker from Maine said he noticed that a link to the CIA’s Telegram channel on Twitter had been truncated, leaving an unused Telegram username available for anyone to claim.
McSheehan immediately registered the username and redirected traffic from the CIA’s Twitter account to his own Telegram channel, where he warned potential recruits not to share any secret or sensitive information.
“The CIA really dropped the ball here,” McSheehan told the BBC. “My immediate thought was panic. I saw that the official Telegram link they were sharing could be hijacked – and my biggest fear was that a country like Russia, China or North Korea could easily intercept Western intelligence.”
The security breach has since been fixed.
The sources for this piece include an article in BBC.
