Cricket South Africa has apologised after its official Facebook page was hacked, subjecting fans to over a dozen sexually explicit posts in the space of two hours on Wednesday morning.
Cricket fans were given a rude shock when the Cricket South Africa official Facebook page, which has more than three million likes, began posting links to stories with sexual and racist content.
Some of the headlines in the links included:
- 9 Pictures That Show How Michael Jackson’s Face Has Changed
- A Russian Laboratory Has Invented A Way to Remove The Black Skin Layer Of Black People
- Kendall Jenner puts her NIPPLES and BUTT on display in See Through Outfit!
- What Happens During Sex In The Human Body
- Meet the World’s Sexiest Mexican Instagram Model
The confronting images images included semi-naked women in bikinis and a couple lying in bed naked together.
Cricket South Africa issued an apology on their Twitter account as soon as they realised the account had been hacked.
Evening everyone, we are aware that our Facebook page has been hacked & are working on resolving the issue.
— Cricket South Africa (@OfficialCSA) December 8, 2015
Our apologies for the inappropriate posts that are currently up, we will have this issue sorted out as soon as possible.
— Cricket South Africa (@OfficialCSA) December 8, 2015
Other posts, which were racist in nature, were not well received by fans on the page, who slammed Cricket South Africa for not deleting the posts, even though it appears apparent they were powerless to do so.
Australian-born cricketer Riki Wessels was one of the first to notice the blunder and tweeted that he thought the whole incident was rather funny, as did others.
South African cricket just got exciting after the tour of India @OfficialCSA #oops pic.twitter.com/DJahBSWv1Q
— Riki Wessels (@RikiWessels) December 8, 2015
The posts have since been removed as of Wednesday morning with an accompanying CSA official apology.
Good morning everyone.
We would like to apologize for the inappropriate posts that came off this page during the course of last night and this morning. Our Facebook page was indeed hacked, but the issue has since been resolved and we have fortified our security measures to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.
Regards
CSA Team
Some fans clearly didn’t pick up on the breach as John Hare commented: “Wtf is this? U guys have to focus on the England tour not kissing tips, don’t wanna be losing another test series now.”
User Felicity Clark summed it up best by writing a comment on one of the posts: “How is this relevant to cricket?”