As voting starts in Venezuela, front-runner Maduro gets hacked on Twitter

The acting President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro is the front runner going into today’s election followed the death of Hugo Chávez last month. His campaign suffered a minor blow as several Twitter accounts associated with the campaign her hacked a group calling themselves Lulz Security Peru.

The primary, verified account has over 700k followers and has been very active over the weeks leading up to the election. For the last two hours since 3:22 pm Pacific time, the accounts has been under hacker control. This was their first Tweet from the account:

Since then, the Tweets have been more boastful than anything else with one even mentioned in Spanish for US President Barack Obama to “suck it”. The other accounts affected were @PartidoPSUV and @tmaniglia which are controlled by the press secretary.

Maduro’s campaign chief Jorge Rodriguez said the attacks were “yet another sign of the enormous desperation” of the opposition supporters. Chavez had hand selected Maduro to be his successor and is poised to win, Twitter account hack or not, despite a strong showing from challenger Henrique Capriles.