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Oklahoman Twitter Accounts Hacked!

11:42 AM EDT on July 25, 2022

Oklahoma City Twitter users and bots who wake up early on Sundays – or just stay out way too late on Saturdays – were treated to a fun laugh yesterday when some troll hijacked various sports accounts affiliated with The Oklahoman_.

The accounts affected were @OklahomanSports and their juvenile athletics-focused account @HSvarsity.

The tweets were eventually deleted after The Oklahoman's out-of-state corporate ownership commandeered the situation, but not before everyone made the requisite screenshots and sent them to us. Here are some examples:

As you can see via the time stamps, the overnight tweets were online for hours before anyone from The Oklahoman seemed to notice.

In fact, I can see ole' Boomer Trammel clad in his old man pajamas right now, logging into Twitter Sunday morning from his Dell desktop before going to church, and then looking down at the ghastly tweets in terror through his bifocals, frantically left-clicking his mouse on the "report tweet" button.

Here are some tweets from the @HSvarsity account.

The tweets were all eventually deleted after The Oklahoman changed passwords and booted the hacker. The paper didn't acknowledge the hack.

The culprit or culprits behind the takeover are unknown, but as you can see, they were definitely immature and seemed to have some sort of ax to grind. On that note, I guess I should go ahead and deny it was us!

That being said, I played a game of amateur detective and do have three possible suspects the password police may want to question for more details...

Cameron Jourdan

Cam is famous for making the Oklahoma Journalism Blunder Hall of Fame after he identified the wrong man as the diabetic racist basketball announcer who called the Norman High School girls basketball team a bunch of N-words on a hot mic. That case is still winding through the courts.

Cam left the paper in July to write about golf and could possibly still have access to The Oklahoman's passwords. He could also be mad at Gannett – the paper's owner – for not doing more to get his back after the reporting error. I would reach out on Twitter and ask him, but he's already blocked us. Womp womp.

Mel Bracht

For a while, Mel had the easiest job in the world. Once a week, he'd shared his favorite sporting events to watch on the tube along with that week's local TV ratings. Every now and then, he'd even write mean things about Regular Jim Traber! He could be salty at The Oklahoman for taking away this gig, and the hack attack could be his sweet revenge.

Mike "Mr. Monday" Koehler

The inventor of the famed #OKWX hashtag, Mike Koehler – the paper's former backup sports editor who once wrote a sarcastic sports column under the guise of Mr. Monday – is a social media guru who may have created the accounts that were hacked. Perhaps the paper never updated the passwords, and Koehler – while on an overnight drug-fueled binge at a social media conference in Vegas – logged into the accounts thinking they were one of his burners.

Once again, those are just three hunches on who may have been behind the attack. Please share yours in the comments...

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