According to a report by ECO, TAP has been the victim of a fraud, losing access to its Twitter account, following the airline's account posting strange messages this Tuesday, around lunchtime: a series of tweets with the word "awesome".

When contacted, TAP's official source declined, for the time being, to comment on what had happened. The company is aware of the situation and is investigating the causes of this incident, according to ECO.

By 2:30 pm, the TAP Twitter account had the name “.” and did not have any profile picture, despite keeping the original username @tapairportugal. It was not clear whether or not TAP had already regained control of its account on the social network, but six tweets with the message “awesome” were still visible to the public.

TAP has more than 80,000 followers and 106,000 published tweets. Despite the apparent intrusion, the company still maintained, at that time, the blue seal of authenticity attributed by Twitter to users considered to be of public interest. More than 12 tweets have presumably been deleted, with the platform displaying the message “this tweet is unavailable”.

The problem seems to be confined to Twitter, given that TAP's Facebook and Instagram accounts continued to show apparent normality. However, it was not possible to confirm whether the invasion was limited to social networks or whether third parties had accessed more of the company's digital properties.

This is the third media cybersecurity incident in Portugal since the beginning of this year. 2022 started with a group of attackers taking control of the websites of the Impresa group, including SIC Notícias and Expresso, which currently continue to work in a provisional version, with no historical files available.

On Sunday, it was made public that the website of the Assembly of the Republic may have been the target of a cyberattack. Like Impresa, this case is also being investigated by the Judiciary Police, and the Parliament website has been unavailable for almost a day, while an audit is being carried out to verify the authenticity of the information.