While enjoying your 4th of July holiday this past weekend, you may have caught wind of the disturbing headlines stating that that Fox News political Twitter account sent tweets reporting that President Barack Obama had been assassinated. It is being reported that hacker group, Scriptkiddies (SK) broke into Fox News’ Twitter accounts and used it to distribute the fake and heinous news.
Before hacking the Fox News political page the ScriptKiddies went on to brag about their hacking success on various outlets (including several Twitter accounts that are now suspended). These brags were even found on the Fox News politics page where the company’s logo was replaced by the SK logo and tweets were posted reading:
*foxnewspolitics – @AnonymousIRC TheScriptKiddies would love to assist with #antisec in anyway you need assistance.
*foxnewspolitics – Fox News politics hacked by the scrip tkiddies! Twitter.com/#!/thescriptki… more embarrasement for FoxNews is imitate.
The postings by the hackers started out fairly harmless before taking an ugly turn to tweets revealing:
*foxnewspolitics -BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It’s a sad 4th for #america. #obamadead RIP.
*foxnewspolitics – #ObamaDead, it’s a sad 4th of July. RT to support the late president’s family, and RIP. The shooter will be found.
This hacking follows a stream of hackings that occurred within the past few weeks largely involving infamous hacking group LulzSec. Some speculations suggest that ScriptKiddies may be in association with the recently dismantled group.
It appears that the Fox News politics did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding this story. The more than 34,000 followers of the Fox News politics page questioned how their timelines were invaded with such false and grotesque news and wondered could the outlet continue to be trusted.
It became even more obvious to many of the page’s followers that the tweets had likely been a result of a page hack after other major news broadcasters failed to report the groundbreaking story. Following detection that they had indeed been the victim’s of a page hacking, Fox News posted a statement on their website describing the posted tweets as malicious. According to the vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital, Jeff Misenti “We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts.”
Since the recent hacking, the @foxnewspolitics account has been removed from Twitter. This just begs the question, what measures will be taken to ensure that hacks like these don’t happen in the future? If the FBI and other government agencies can be hacked and now even our news sources are no longer safe, who or what is? We hope that these hackers can begin to use their abilities for good. If not, there may be a lot of trouble ahead of us, America. Let’s hope this is will bring about the end and not the beginning.
3 Comments
If even a solid and trusted international news social media account is not safe from identity theft, what more for a regular business of personal account? I think we all should be cautious and careful about the usage of social media, safeguard personal information and do necessary preventions. The privacy settings should be checked and kept.
They are brilliantly illustrating the difference between actually getting hacked (where there’s really no value in removing a point-in-time post), and what Rep Weiner did with his “hacked” claim and ensuing cover-up. I suspect it’s better to leave it as-is to support the ongoing Secret Service investigation. That would be called, “putting national interests above your own”. But based on your post, I would assume you’re not familiar with the concept. I can’t, for example, imagine Stephanopolis over at ABC threatening Bachmann’s kids (which he did) because he doesn’t fantasize about punishing them for their mother’s gall in daring to disagree with him. If that’s what you call professional journalism, you can keep it.
Its not really surprising because everyone is always using there information makes it a perfect target for scams.