On Sunday evening, the Instagram account of the chief master sergeant of the Space Force began pumping out pro-Iran propaganda in an apparent security breach at the Pentagon.
The social media account of Space Force Chief Master Sergeant John F. Bentivegna, which has just over 1,000 followers, typically posts updates for the branch’s enlisted rank-and-file. Visitors on Sunday evening were instead met with graphics calling for America’s defeat in the monthslong conflict.
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The Obama White House account was also targeted in what appears to be a systematic operation by regime-aligned hackers.
One post featured a voiceover from the Vietnamese radio personality “Hanoi Hannah,” which became infamous among American troops for English-language broadcasts encouraging them to defect. “They will give you a medal, GI, but only after you are dead,” the voiceover, which was set to music, declared. “Your government lies to you every day, poor soldier.”
“This is what the American soldier heard in the Vietnam War before America’s defeat,” the post’s accompanying Arabic text read. “This is your fate if you go near the Middle East.”
The Space Force account also posted a video montage of the Iranian official Ali Larijani. Larijani served as Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Tehran’s highest defense and national security body, before his March assassination in an Israeli airstrike. The post featured an Arabic description warning that Larijani “will set foot in America.”
Another post featured an artificially generated image of a cloaked figure with a sword in hand, staring into a cloudy abyss. The man appears to be Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law and the progenitor of Shiite Islam.
The chief master sergeant is the Space Force’s highest-ranking enlisted guardian. Bentivegna is the second person to hold the position since Congress established the military’s newest branch in 2019.
Bentivegna acknowledged the hack in a Sunday evening post on Facebook, which is also owned by Meta, Instagram’s parent company. “Experiences like this are a good reminder that cybersecurity isn’t just an issue for organizations, it’s something we all deal with in our daily lives,” he wrote.
The hacks came days after President Donald Trump convened a Friday meeting in the White House Situation Room to make a “final determination” on a deal to end the war with Iran.
In April, then-Navy Secretary John Phelan warned sailors that “adversary cyber actors” were targeting Navy personnel and their families on social media. Michael Smith, the field chief technology officer at cybersecurity company DigiCert, told the Associated Press in March that Iran’s high-volume, low-impact digital attacks are “a way of telling people in other countries that you can still reach out and touch them even though they’re on a different continent.”
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“The official Instagram account of the Chief Master Sergeant of the United States Space Force has been compromised,” the Space Force wrote in a statement to the Washington Examiner. ”We are currently working with the appropriate teams to regain access and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
A Meta spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that both the Obama White House and Space Force accounts “were quickly secured.” As of early Monday morning, the offending content had been removed from the Space Force account.
