Hosni Mubarak, the disgraced former president of Egypt, may be seriously ill in jail, but – at the time of writing – he isn’t dead.
If you had turned to Twitter earlier today, however, you might have been fooled into believing that Mubarak – who is serving a life sentence – had died, after some users were apparently duped by a bogus Twitter account.
One of the accounts which spread the news of Mubarak’s alleged death (fortunately they did say “unconfirmed”) was the foreign desk of the British Sunday Times newspaper:
The reports of Mubark’s alleged death appear to have emerged from a Twitter account claiming to belong to Egyptian Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim.
INTERIOR MINISTRY OF ARAB REPUBLIC OF EGYPT CONFIRMS THAT FORMER PRESIDENT MUBARAK DIES TODAY. MORE DETAILS LATER.
However, the Twitter account had only been created an hour before the announcement of the “death”, calling into question its authenticity.
As with the…
Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.
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