Apple, Fox News hacked over Fourth of July weekend
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Despite a long holiday weekend, hackers kept working, targeting Fox News and Apple Inc. in the latest round of cyber attacks.
Hackers exposed numerous email and password combinations related to Apple and infiltrated a Fox News’ Twitter account, sending out several tweets falsely claiming that President Obama had been assassinated.
As America celebrated its independence, hackers took control of the Fox News’ Twitter account and tweeted six messages to @foxnewspolitics’ 34,000 followers stating that the president had been killed early Monday morning, according to Fox News.
The tweets, which were noticed about 5 a.m. EDT, were deleted after Twitter suspended the account around noon and returned control of it to Fox News. The news outlet was unable to access the account for hours as the hackers changed the password once they were in.
The news network addressed the intrusion in a post online and said it was working with Twitter to figure out what had happened.
‘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, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital.
[Updated, 12:15 p.m., July 5: ‘The network was not in control of the account once it was hacked, and Twitter was unreachable until late morning eastern time yesterday,’ Misenti said. ‘The tweets were taken down as soon as Twitter gave back control of the account to the network.’]
Hackers of the online activist group Anonymous went after tech leader Apple a day prior.
A Twitter account associated with the group made a tweet Sunday implying that Apple could be a future target of a larger hack attack as it also linked to a document on PasteBin with a list of emails and passwords.
‘Apple could be target, too,’ the tweet read. ‘But don’t worry, we are busy elsewhere.’
For the record, 12:15 p.m., July 5: An earlier version of this post stated that hackers of a Fox News Twitter account had tweeted five messages. They tweeted six messages.
For the record, 2:01 p.m., July 5: An earlier version of this post stated that a cyber attack targeting Apple Inc. exposed a list of email and password combinations. The list was of user and password combinations.
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-- Salvador Rodriguez
Twitter.com/sal19
