Posted on July 7th, 2011Fake reports of Barack Obama’s assassination flooded the internet on Monday, after Fox News politics found its Twitter account hacked. The Guardian reported that this act has been claimed to be a component of a much larger anti-secular movement being made against the government and businesses by a group of hackers, who took responsibility of it after managing to create a loose connection with Anonymous, Script Kiddies.
Fox News reports that they have requested Twitter to get involved in the security investigation along with the US Secret Service in order to scrutinize the attack.
The Twitter account Fox News Politics is allegedly verified with a green checkmark which, according to Twitter is an important indicator for the company as, “Twitter uses this to establish authenticity of well known accounts so users can trust that a legitimate source is authoring their Tweets”. According to a report by CNET, the false tweets submitted by the hackers on the account remained online for public viewing for nine hours.
Jeff Misenti, the vice president and general manager of FoxNews.com, made a statement saying, “We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts”
Think Magazine was able to organize an interview with a representative of Script Kiddies who said they did so because they “figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting”
The representative said, “I would consider us to be close in relation [to Anonymous], two of the members of our group were members of Anonymous…I was a member of Anonymous. We hope to be working with them soon” After the event, Twitter gave out a statement on Monday claiming that the company cannot be held responsible for compromises which take place offsite. The company said in a statement that, “While Twitter does monitor accounts for brute-force login attempts and similar methods of attack, we’re unable to anticipate compromise that take place due to offsite behavior.”
Fox had previously been a target by hackers when LulzSec leaked names, contact details and personal details of participants of its X-Factor game show. The attack on the company proves besides securing websites from hackers, it is necessary to also protect a company’s online presence outlets open to the public, such as Facebook and Twitter.