We have been bringing you a lot of news regarding hacking recently and today we have another story to do with the cyber-crime. It appears that earlier today Fox News, a US broadcaster, were the victims of a hack that led to their Twitter account being compromised. The group claiming to be responsible then posted a tweet declaring US President, Barack Obama dead.
If you had logged onto the social networking site earlier this morning, you would have noticed that @foxnewspolitics had the tweet ‘BREAKING NEWS: @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much’ posted in their feed for more than two hours. The group called The Script Kiddies was claiming responsibility for the hack.
The Script Kiddies account was immediately suspended. The messages first started appearing on the Fox News Politics Twitter account, which is verified by the Twitter tick icon, confirming it belongs to the official cable news network, at around 7:00am BST this morning. Fox News says they are investigating the attack and have requested that Twitter look into how this happened in the first place and take action to prevent it happening again.
Fox News is not the first victims of unauthorized access to accounts either. They are just the latest in a series of attacks from groups of hackers. In this case no confidential data was stolen as other unfortunate companies have found has happened to them, though something that may seem so harmless to the group is actually a serious breach and a sick joke.
Other victims of this type of crime include the CIA, who found their website had been disrupted and was down. The hacking group LulzSec was claiming responsibility while also claiming they had stolen confidential data. Another victim was British law enforcement agency SOCA, whose website also went down with the same group of hackers claiming responsibility and similar information stolen.
While it appears that this type of crime is getting out of hand the US government is doing its best to upgrade their cyber technology in order to fight back and stop these types of crimes happening. Their defense section was recently injected with $500 million in order to improve their technology.
Earlier today we brought you news that one of the leading manufacturers of consumer electronics in the market, Apple may also be under threat from an attack like these listed above. Hacking group Anonymous had listed 27 names and passwords, belonging to an Apple website, on the internet. They also warned they may attack Apple in future.
What do you think can be done to stop attacks like this from happening in future?
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