Hackers have taken over a Twitter account belonging to US broadcaster Fox News and declared President Obama dead. The @foxnewspolitics feed stated: “BREAKING NEWS: @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much.”
More than two hours after the malicious postings appeared, they had still not been removed.
A group or individual, calling themselves The Script Kiddies appeared to claim responsibility. Fox News said it was investigating the posts. The bizarre messages began appearing around 07.00 BST on July 4.
The first read: “Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th.” The next posting stated: “@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead.”
Fox News Politics is one of the Twitter accounts associated with the industry-leading cable news network.Its Twitter account carries the “verified” tick icon, indicating that the feed belongs to the organisation it claims to be.
In a statement, Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital said: “We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts.”
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so is obama dead?
Ohhhhhh, surely Fox should know that ‘password123′ is not sufficient protection… :-/
That’s just despicable! What kind of a sick person would fake something as terrible as that? I find it so annoying that lifeless hackers would stoop this low. Even if they actually did announce this without being hacked, people shouldn’t believe it unless Barack Obama’s official Twitter account said it.
Also, this explains why #foxnewstwitterpassword is trending on Twitter.
Ridiculous, its almost as far fetched as the reports of Osamas’ death recently…
At least it’s no less accurate than their usual journalism. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fox News hire the hackers to write their headlines.
Who is Obama?
That’s not hacking, that’s brute-forcing a low security password. Hence the name Script Kiddies, probably. Just a bunch of bored trolls if you ask me.
Fox News should create harder-to-guess password to prevent such malicious news in the future.
April fools!!! Wait, that’ not on the 4th nor in July, is it?
Someone got the wrong memo.
Being a democrat living in America, and hearing the inaccurate news that Fox news puts out all the time, I read this tweet, calmly turned on the tv, saw no news stories were on, so I just ignored it. My reaction makes me sad actually – that something like a post from a national “news” organization about my president who I voted for being assassinated really didn’t invoke much worry, rather an instant feeling of annoyance with trolls. Also, makes me sad that part of me really believes that the people at Fox news probably were secretly thrilled with the whole thing. And I’m about the least cynical person I know!