President Trump mocked London Mayor Sadiq Khan on Saturday after his city’s Metropolitan Police Service suffered an embarrassing cybersecurity breach.
“With the incompetent Mayor of London, you will never have safe streets!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
Mr. Trump’s comment was made in response to a tweet posted hours earlier by Katie Hopkins, a right-wing British media personality who pointed out an apparent breach of the Met’s Twitter account.
“Officers says they have lost control of London streets,” Ms. Hopkins tweeted. “Apparently they lost control of their twitter account too.”
Scotland Yard subsequently announced that police are investigating the circumstances surrounding a series of unauthorizes messages that appeared online Friday evening, “on the news section of our website as well as on the @metpoliceuk Twitter feed and in emails sent to subscribers.”
In a statement, the Met suggested the messages were made by accessing its account with MyNewsDesk, an online service used by the law enforcement agency to post content online to on platforms.
“At this stage, we are confident the only security issue relates to access to our MyNewsDesk account,” the statement said. “There has been no ’hack’ of the Met Police’s own IT infrastructure.”
The tweet that prompted Mr. Trump’s Twitter attack against London’s mayor included an image showing one of the several strange posts that appeared online the previous evening.
“what you gonna do phone the police?” asked one of the tweets. “XEON IS THE BEST FIGHTER IN SCOTLND,” said another.
The dozen tweets spanned around 40 minutes, The Guardian reported.
“We are assessing to establish what criminal offences have been committed,” Scotland Yard said in a statement.
London’s first Muslim mayor, Mr. Khan has regularly feuded with Mr. Trump since the president proposed banning Muslims from entering the U.S.
Traveling to the U.K. for a state visit last month, Mr. Trump called Mr. Khan a “stone-cold loser” and “very dumb” before even stepping on British soil.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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