Hacked: Eindhovens Dagblad loses control of their Twitter account for second day

The Twitter account @ED_Eindhoven, which is run by the Eindhovens Dagblad, was hacked Sunday at around 6:30 p.m. The newspaper still had not regained control of the account by 2 p.m. on Monday.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the hack. Everything was being done to get the account back, "but we are dependent on Twitter,” said the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Joris Roes. He previously asked users to report the profile to indicate it was hacked.

"We haven’t been able to get hold of Twitter yet," Roes said on Monday morning. "We are really try to track them down, but they are very difficult to reach. We are very disappointed." The newspaper is at least temporarily using @ED_Regio to inform its readers of news stories and updates.

A night earlier, Roes asked that newspaper followers not worry. "Everyone knows by now that we have been hacked, and that the messages are not coming from us. The fun will soon be over for the hackers. In the meantime, we are making contact with Twitter and we will have to wait and see." Roes previously told ANP that he found the hack "very irritating."

The hackers wrote in one tweet that they wanted to entertain themselves a bit. "We could also use this account to scam people. But we won't go that far... Just having a little fun!" The hackers also referee to a Telegram account that currently has about thirty subscribers.

The account was renamed AJAX FANS by unknown persons on Sunday evening, and called for people to cast votes for the far-right political parties PVV and Forum voor Democratie. Over the course of the evening, the account was given other names, such as D66 AANHANGER, jokingly referring to support for the D66 political party.

The account was taken over shortly before the end of the Ajax-PSV Eredivisie rivalry match. The team from Amsterdam lost 1-2.

General secretary Thomas Bruning of the Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ) said that this is "an expensive lesson that you must have these types of accounts properly secured. Even though it may be a bad joke, for a medium like the Eindhovens Dagblad it does detract from their reliability as a journalistic title and is very damaging.” According to Bruning, journalistic media must do everything they can to "have the security of their website and accounts 100 percent in order.”