Fed Up With Vodafone's Poor Service, This Angry Hacker Took Over Their Twitter Handle For Kicks

If you've ever been unhappy with your phone service, you'll probably somewhat relate to this.

Vodafone India's Twitter handle was briefly hacked today by a Turkish collective going by the name of Ayyildiz Tim (Star and Crescent Team) in protest of censorship.

The hacker group managed to wrest away control of the company's Twitter account earlier this afternoon, only to immediately post a message from their leaders. As best as can be translated from the post they tweeted, they're apparently upset that Vodafone is blocking their official web page.

It remains accessible here in India, so they're likely talking about in their home state. Vodafone India quickly managed to regain control, and has since deleted the post.

This isn't the first Ayyildiz Tim has targeted Indian handles either. The group has previously been responsible for hacking the Twitter accounts of Bollywood stars like Anupam Kher, Abhishek Bachchan, and Shahid Kapoor (as well as his Instagram account).

Official Twitter Handle of Vodafone was hacked today by Turkish Hackers.#trakintech #tech #Vodafone pic.twitter.com/ukLlK4Cpid

¡ª TrakinTech (@TrakinTech) October 16, 2018

To be clear, this is an issue of censorship the Star and Crescent team is tackling, but it's a bit of a grey area. You see, Ayyildiz Tim are not hacktivists. It's actually been established that they're the digital paramilitary arm of the Turkish far right government. They've previously also targeted employees at the World Economic Forum, and journalists from Bloomberg, the New York Times, and more.

It's unclear if the Twitter handle of only Vodafone's India arm was hacked or those from other countries were also compromised. The company refused to comment on the matter beyond the fact that the hack did occur, and was rectified within minutes.