NBC News Twitter account hacked with fake news of 9/11 Ground Zero attack

Sick-minded hackers have broken into the Twitter account of NBC News and posted messages claiming that there has been a terrorist attack at Ground Zero in New York.

The bogus messages claimed that Flight 4782 has been hijacked and another plane crashed into the site where the Twin Towers collapsed ten years ago.

NBCNews’s Digital Officer Vivian Schiller tweeted confirming that their official account had been hacked, and asked followers not to retweet any of the offending messages:

In a subsequent message, Schiller confirmed that NBCNews was “working with Twitter to correct the problem and sincerely apologize for the scare that could have been caused by a such a reckless and irresponsible act.”

A group calling themselves the Script Kiddies have claimed responsibility for the hack. The same group previously hijacked and defaced Pfizer’s Facebook page and…

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.