On Sunday evening at Beirut’s airport, the electronic departure boards were hacked to display anti-Iranian and anti-Hezbollah messages by a group named “Lord and the People.”
The messages included statements such as:
This is Rafik Hariri Airport, not Hezbollah and Iran Airport.
To Hassan Nasrallah, you will not find a helper if Lebanon is afflicted in a war and you bear responsibility for it and its consequences.
We will not fight on behalf of anyone. You blew up our port and now you want to blow up our airport because of the introduction of weapons. Let the airport be freed from the grip of the state.
Hassan Nasrallah is the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Some passengers recorded the unusual scene on their smartphones and shared the footage on social media.
قرصنة شاشات صالة #مطار_بيروت وظهر على الشاشات شعار #جنود_الرب مرفق برسالة لـ #حزب_الله pic.twitter.com/X2yhgJiGLR
— Al Jadeed News (@ALJADEEDNEWS) January 7, 2024
Despite the incident, flights continued to leave the airport on schedule, but it likely inconvenienced and caused concern to some passengers.
At the same time, Lebanese travelers reported receiving text messages on their phones claiming to be from Middle East Airlines (MEA), asking them to “adhere to the instructions of the security services.” MEA clarified that they were not responsible for these messages.
This isn’t the first time that hackers have targeted departure boards. For example, in 2021, hackers hijacked railway station departure boards in Iran, warning of “long delay[s] because of cyberattack” and suggesting inconvenienced passengers call a particular number for more information, which happened to belong to the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.