On July 4, a Fox News official Twitter feed, “Foxnewspolitics”, was hacked. Beginning at around 2AM, several fabricated posts describing that President Barack Obama had been shot and killed in a restaurant in Iowa while “campaigning” were tweeted from the official stream.
Fox News posted an official statement on their website saying, “FoxNews.com’s Twitter feed for political news, FoxNewspolitics, was hacked early Monday morning.” Fox condemned the tweets as “false” and “malicious” and had “alerted the U.S. Secret Service, which will investigate the hacking.” Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie stated that the agency would conduct “appropriate follow up.”
The “fake” tweets were not removed from the website until almost two hours after they were posted according to entertainment publication Zap2it. This is attributed to the late hour at which the posts occurred.
Adam Peck, a student journalist from Stony Brook University’s Think Magazine, claims to have conducted an interview with a representative of the Script Kiddies, a hacker group who say that they perpetrated the attack on Fox.
“Fox News was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting,” said the representative.
The unnamed interviewee also claims that the group has ties to “hacktivist” commune Anonymous, stating that he and two of the group’s members had originally been a part of Anonymous and that they are contributing to the overall hacktivist operation “AntiSec”, an effort dedicated to attacking government and commercial entities.
Furthermore, the Script Kiddies twitter accounts have apparently been suspended. Searches for either of the accounts mentioned on Think’s website, @ScriptKiddi3s or @TheScriptKiddie, yield only the results “This user does not exist” or “Sorry, the profile you are trying to view has been suspended.”
Peck’s summary of the interview is posted on Think Magazine’s website, thinksb.com.
Fox News posted an official statement on their website saying, “FoxNews.com’s Twitter feed for political news, FoxNewspolitics, was hacked early Monday morning.” Fox condemned the tweets as “false” and “malicious” and had “alerted the U.S. Secret Service, which will investigate the hacking.” Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie stated that the agency would conduct “appropriate follow up.”
The “fake” tweets were not removed from the website until almost two hours after they were posted according to entertainment publication Zap2it. This is attributed to the late hour at which the posts occurred.
Adam Peck, a student journalist from Stony Brook University’s Think Magazine, claims to have conducted an interview with a representative of the Script Kiddies, a hacker group who say that they perpetrated the attack on Fox.
“Fox News was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting,” said the representative.
The unnamed interviewee also claims that the group has ties to “hacktivist” commune Anonymous, stating that he and two of the group’s members had originally been a part of Anonymous and that they are contributing to the overall hacktivist operation “AntiSec”, an effort dedicated to attacking government and commercial entities.
Furthermore, the Script Kiddies twitter accounts have apparently been suspended. Searches for either of the accounts mentioned on Think’s website, @ScriptKiddi3s or @TheScriptKiddie, yield only the results “This user does not exist” or “Sorry, the profile you are trying to view has been suspended.”
Peck’s summary of the interview is posted on Think Magazine’s website, thinksb.com.
