Following the trend of Twitter hijacking, a Syrian hacktivist group hijacked the BBC Weather Twitter account on Thursday afternoon. BBC uses its @BBCWeather account to tweet weather updates and warnings, as well as behind-the-scenes pictures from BBC forecasters and presenters.

So yesterday, instead of getting the usual updates, the 60,000 followers of the @BBCWeather account on Twitter were confronted with a series of weird messages. Some of the messages include:

Hazardous fog warning for North Syria: Erdogan orders terrorists to launch chemical weapons at civilian areas.

Saudi weather station down due to head on-collision with camel.

Scandal: Edinburgh storm warning station decommissioned after maintenance fund diverted to arming Syrian opposition

Tsunami alert for Haifa: Residents are advised to return to Poland

Thank for hanging out with us! To know the truth about the global terrorist war on #Syria, follow @Official_SEA #SEA

Apparently, a pro-Assad group – Syrian Electronic Army took credit for the hijack. The same group also claimed responsibility for the hijack Al-Jazeera’s mobile news feed last year. The motive behind the hijack is to push out propaganda to a wider audience rather than any intention to spread malicious links, or to promote diet scams, as usually happens in case of Twitter account hijacks.

“Whether the legitimate owners of the @BBCWeather account were phished, had their password cracked, or made the mistake of using the same password in multiple places isn’t currently clear – but what is obvious is that right now they have no control over their account,” writes Graham Cluley of Sophos in a blog post.

The @BBCWeather account was compromised for around two hours before the bizarre tweets were deleted and normality restored. Later at around 15.40, the account indicated the BBC had regained control, apologized for the disruption and confirmed normal services.

The BBC is the latest high profile victim of Twitter account hijacking. The incidents are increasing day-by-day probably because Twitter’s still not very good at security measures, and its putative plans to introduce two-factor authentication are not coming into action anytime soon.