USA Today’s Twitter account falls foul of hackers

USA Today is the latest high profile Twitter account to have fallen victim to a group of hackers.

A group calling themselves the Script Kiddies have claimed responsibility for the hack, which involved posting a series of messages to the official USA Today Twitter account, including:

“Fox News, Wal-mart, Unilevel, Pfizer, NBC and now USA Today. who’s next? Vote now! [LINK]”

and

“Please like The Script Kiddies on Facebook! You could choose our next target!”

Fortunately, USA Today was able to regain control of the account (with some assistance from Twitter) before any serious harm could be caused. The newspaper tweeted an apology to its followers:

The Script Kiddies group has previously claimed responsibility for hacking into the NBC News Twitter account to post fake news reports of a terrorist attack…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity 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 analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.