Fox News Twitter Account Hacked, Says Obama Assassinated

Fox News Twitter Account Hacked, Says Obama Assassinated

David Murphy
PC Magazine
July 4, 2011

It seems that Fox News needs to have a quick chat with one of its competitors, the Public Broadcasting Service. Perhaps the two can commiserate over tea, for Fox has now joined the exclusive ranks of companies whose Twitter feeds have been infiltrated by a group tangentially related to the hacktivists Anonymous.

The Twitter feed @foxnewspolitics was broken into early this morning and, as of this article's writing, it appears that Fox representatives are still locked out of the account. The last fake message posted to the account was the final message in a series of Tweets suggesting that President Obama had been assassinated in Iowa. A group calling itself The Script Kiddies sent out a message to @foxnewspolitics' 33,000 twitter followers stating that Vice President Biden had officially taken on his new role as president, and the account has remained silent from that point on.

"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," said a Script Kiddies representative in an interview with Stony Brook University's Think Magazine.

According to the representative, Fox is aware that its account has been broken into. While two Twitter accounts for the Script Kiddies group have been suspended in the meantime, Fox representatives apparently have yet to actually log into their Twitter account to perform any kind of damage control. Fox News has issued a statement on its website to deny the false stories that were posted to its account. The company also says that it's contacted the U.S. Secret Service to alert them about the issue.

"We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts," said Jeff Misenti, Fox News Digital's vice president and general manager.

Script Kiddies is not a subgroup of the popular hactivist group Anonymous. However, a Script Kiddies representative indicated that he (or she) was formerly a member, as were two other Script Kiddies hackers. The group hopes to work in tandem with Anonymous at some point in the future—perhaps for other attacks against Fox News.

"I've looked into their security, and site defacement does not seem to be an option. Everything else is fair game," said the Script Kiddies representative.