Fox News Twitter account announces Barack Obama dead after hack

An official Twitter account belonging to the political team at Fox News has been compromised and fallen into the hands of hackers who have posted false stories claiming that Barack Obama has been assassinated.

The messages were posted at approximately 2am local time, and were quickly retweeted across the network.

Messages posted to the @FoxNewsPolitics account included:

BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It’s a sad 4th for #america. #obamadead RIP

and

We wish @joebiden the best of luck as our new President of the United States. In such a time of madness, there’s light at the end of tunnel

The rogue tweets seem to have begun after a message was posted on the FoxNewsPolitics account saying “Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th”.

That message implies that whoever hacked into the account compromised the email address of the person…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.