Over the weekend, the verified @FoxNewsPolitics Twitter account was hacked, as reported earlier. Fox News confirmed the hack in a story today and added some details:
Hackers sent out several malicious and false tweets claiming that President Obama had been assassinated. Those reports were incorrect, of course, and the president was spending the July 4 holiday with his family at the White House.
The tweets have been removed from the feed.
FoxNews.com alerted the U.S. Secret Service, which will investigate the hacking and do “appropriate follow up,” spokesman George Ogilvie said.
Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital, said FoxNews.com was working with Twitter to address the situation as quickly as possible.
“We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts,” Misenti said.
I still saw the tweets last night at 11PM but supposedly they were taken down by then. ThreatPost cites a source with knowledge about the attack, detailing some of the events that happened over Independence Day.
A source with knowledge of the attack says that Fox reacted immediately to the breach, but that San Francisco based Twitter was slow to respond and remove the offending messages. The messages were gone by noon on Monday. Twitter has not responded to requests for comment from Threatpost.
The U.S. Secret Service investigation is likely to focus on the source, rather than the technical details of the attack. Word of the breach first spread from a Twitter account @thescriptkiddie. That account was suspended on Monday and remained offline on Tuesday.