Fox Twitter Account Hacked, Claims Obama Shot in Iowa

The Twitter account for Fox News was obviously hacked, with six tweets falsely reporting early Monday morning that U.S. President Barack Obama had been shot twice in an Iowa eating place while campaigning.

The tweets were posted between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Eastern Fourth dimension by the "foxnewspolitics" score. The account has a badge with a checkmark that means it has been corroborated past Chitter for authenticity.

National media outlets in the U.S., including Fox Intelligence itself, carried No such reports. Fox News ran a story on its site acknowledging the hack, expression information technology "declination some hurt the inharmonious tweets may experience created." The false tweets came along a star U.S. vacation, Independence Twenty-four hour period.

The first twinge astir the assassination — addressed directly to Obama's real account — said "@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July, indeed. President Barack Obama is dead."

Subsequent tweets said that Obama had been shot twice in the glower girdle area and the neck and that he later died from his wounds, with the shooter unknown.

Originally along Monday morning, the Huffington Post reported that the Dodger News Politics Twitter feed had been hacked. A screenshot posted by the Huffington Post, showed the Fox News Politics feed carrying the subtitle: "H4CK3D BY TH3 5CR1PT K1DD3S." The channel's logotype had been replaced with the working capital letters SK, presumptively as wel a reference to script kiddies, a term applied to youths WHO hack computers using undecomposable, automated tools or scripts developed by others.

The screenshot also captured two other messages, subsequently deleted, along the Fox News Politics feed, one taking credit for the hack and other directed at Nameless, the hacking integrative that has led a highly made hacking crusade. That tweet also referred to "antisec," short for "Anti-Security," an ongoing hacking operation conducted by Anonymous that has antagonized companies and governments by defacing websites and, in roughly cases, stealing sensitive data.

The first in the series of strange tweets still ocular on the account aforementioned that the account owners had regained brimming access to e-mail and the Chitter feed, in an attempt to allay suspicion about the originally, nowadays deleted, messages.

Twitter typically moves cursorily to delete tweets that come from hacked accounts and has overall stepped up its security. But like umpteen web-based services, Twitter uses logins and passwords to allow access to accounts, which hackers have proved adept at stealing through social engineering science techniques and malware on computer such as keyloggers.

Officials at Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, said they practise not gloss on particularized accounts for privacy reasons but added that users should accompany its strong countersign advice.

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