Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) is a verified account on Twitter with over thirty thousand followers.
The profile tweets in Fox’s normal way, sharing news and updates about the Presidency and politics, albeit with the network’s usual right-of-center bias.
And it’s that bias that will inevitably make the reaction to this news more severe. About 3 hours ago, @foxnewspolitics was hacked. Worse, they’ve written a series of tweets about President Obama being killed, and those messages have spread rapidly throughout the Twittersphere.
It appears the hijackers first took control of the @foxnewspolitics account at or around 1.56 ET, writing a faux tweet about how they’d “just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th.” However, prior to this there had been no update from @foxnewspolitics since June 30, so the hack may have taken place before this.
The exploiters then followed this tweet with a series of messages about how President Obama had been killed.
On today of all days, it’s pretty abhorrent stuff. And of course, because it’s Fox News and because it’s Twitter, the messages have been retweeted heavily, with many people buying into the story.
Hacking group “Scriptkiddies” have claimed credit for the hack. And as of right now the tweets are still intact, so it’s pretty obvious that Fox News has not yet resumed control of the account.