Facebook hackers pwn baseball team pages, claim NY Yankees captain is having sex change

A host of Facebook accounts belonging to US baseball teams were hacked yesterday, and defaced with messages in dubious taste, including one which claimed that New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter was undergoing a sex change.

“We regret to inform our fans that Derek Jeter will miss the rest of the season with sexual reassignment surgery. He promises to come back stronger than ever in 2013 as Minnie Mantlez”

Other clubs affected included the Miami Marlins, San Diego Padres, Chicago White Sox, Washington Nationals, Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants.

Here is a selection of the messages that were posted:

Clearly an unauthorised party had managed to gain admin access to the Facebook pages in order to post the messages – and the first thought is that it would be a very strange coincidence to have the Facebook pages of so many clubs compromised at the same time.

However, it turns out that the clubs run the Facebook pages in conjunction with MLB…

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.