Christmas tree Trojan blamed for NBC News Twitter hack

More information has emerged which might shine a light on the tasteless hack this weekend on the NBC News Twitter account, which resulted in bogus postings about a 9/11-style terrorist attack.

The latest theory appears to be that the @NBCNews Twitter account was broken into by hackers after the email account associated with it was compromised through the use of a keylogger.

According to an MSNBC report, Ryan Osborn, NBC News’s director of social media, could have been sent a spyware Trojan horse that grabbed passwords as they were typed at the keyboard.

Osborn says that he recently received a suspicious email as Hurricane Irene approached New York. The email had the following characteristics…

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.