[real-eyes] Fox News Twitter account announces Barack Obama dead after hack
- From: Steve <kcpadfoot@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: nut@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:07:35 -0500
Here is a shortened URL to the story
http://goo.gl/4UqHP
Fox News Twitter account announces Barack Obama dead after hack
by
Graham Cluley
on July 4, 2011 |
An official Twitter account belonging to the political team at Fox News
has been
compromised and fallen into the hands of hackers who have posted false
stories claiming
that Barack Obama has been assassinated.
The messages were posted at approximately 2am local time, and were
quickly retweeted
across the network.
Fox News tweets
Messages posted to the @FoxNewsPolitics account included:
BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds
have proved
too much. It's a sad 4th for #america. #obamadead RIP
and
We wish @joebiden the best of luck as our new President of the United
States. In
such a time of madness, there's light at the end of tunnel
The rogue tweets seem to have begun after a message was posted on the
FoxNewsPolitics
account saying "Just regained full access to our Twitter and email.
Happy 4th".
That message implies that whoever hacked into the account compromised
the email address
of the person who administers the FoxNewsPolitics account, giving an
unknown third-party
the ability to post tweets at will.
At the time of writing the false announcements are still present on the
FoxNewsPolitics
Twitter page - the July 4th Independence Day holiday may mean that
no-one at Fox
has been able to log into the account to remove the tweets.
A Twitter account calling itself "TheScriptKiddie" has claimed
responsibility for
the attack, but has since been suspended.
The Fox media empire appears to have drawn a lot of fire from hackers in
recent months.
In May, hackers stole details of employees usernames and passwords and
defaced Twitter and LinkedIn pages
.
Previously, the personal information of
more than 250,000 people was stolen
from Fox's The X Factor show.
Although some may be amused by the latest hack, users can clearly be put
at risk
if an account is exploited by somebody with malicious intentions (they
could link
to a website containing malware, as we recently saw with the recent
breach of Simon Pegg's account
for instance).
The employees of Fox responsible for the administration of the company's
social media
accounts might be wise to refresh their knowledge of
password security
and check that their computers have not been compromised with spyware.
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