An administrator Twitter account belong to the political squad at Fox News has been compromise and fall into the hands of hackers who have post false stories claiming that Barrack Obama has been assassinated. The messages were posted at approximately 2am local time, and were quickly retweeted across the network.
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 scoundrel tweet seems to have begun after a message was post on the FoxNewsPolitics account saying “Just regained full right of entry to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th”.
That message imply that whoever hack into the account compromise the email address of the person who administer the FoxNewsPolitics account, giving an unknown third-party the ability to post tweets at will. At the time of writing the false announcement 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 take away the tweets.
A Twitter account vocation itself “TheScriptKiddie” has claim blame for the attack, but has since been balanced.
The Fox media territory appears to have haggard a lot of fire from hackers in new months. In May, hackers stole details of employee’s usernames and passwords and deface Twitter and LinkedIn pages.
Beforehand, the personal information of more than 250,000 people was stolen from Fox’s The X Factor show. Though some may be amused by the newest hack, users can clearly be place at risk if an account is browbeaten by an important person 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 example).
The workers of Fox accountable for the management of the company’s social media financial records might be wise to refresh their information of password security and check that their computers have not been compromised with spyware.