A hacker group calling themselves Scriptkiddies has broken into one of Fox News’ Twitter accounts and used it to disseminate fake news about the assassination of president Obama.
The group gained control of @foxnewspolitics, bragging about it on several Twitter accounts (now suspended).
They didn’t stop there, though; after tweeting a suspicious message on the Fox News Politics account claiming the company had regained the control over that account, they started tweeting messages about a shooting in which President Obama was fatally wounded.
From Techcrunch
There’s nothing even remotely amusing about this: some stupid kids – actual age unknown – have taken over the (verified) @FoxNewPolitics Twitter account and posted a series of messages declaring U.S. President Barack Obama dead on the eve of the Fourth of July, the national day of the United States.
The ‘hackers’ appear to have taken over the account around 2 AM Eastern time, and went on to claim President Obama was shot twice at an Iowa restaurant, that he passed away soon thereafter, and that the shooter’s identity was unknown.
By the time this post was published, the account had seen no tweets for a couple of hours, but neither was it suspended or were any of the fake reports deleted, so whoever gained access to the Twitter account may still have it.
@FoxNewsPolitics has around 33,000 followers, but evidently many of the tweets have been retweeted and spread rapidly across the network.
Multiple reports claim there were more tweets, some declaring the successful hacking of the account, which have since been deleted. One of them reportedly read:
“Fox news politics hacked by the scrip tkiddies! http://t.co/6yZDcTS more embarrassment for FoxNews is imitate”
The link in the tweet led to another Twitter account, which has since been suspended.
THINK claims to have spoken to a ‘representative’ of The Script Kiddies, who said:
“I would consider us to be close in relation to Anonymous, 2 of the members of our group were members of Anonymous. I was a member of Anonymous.
We hope to be working with them soon.”
He or she also said this was only the beginning, and explained why Fox News was singled out:
“We are looking to find information about corporations to assist with antisec.
Fox News was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting.”
They also appear to have talked to The Hacker News, if you’re interested.
