The ruse discovered Wednesday included bogus tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities were also hacked. Hackers used social engineering to target some of Twitter’s employees and then gained access to the high-profile accounts. The attackers sent out tweets from the accounts of the public figures, offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
Hackers didn’t waste any time and have started hijacking Disney+ user accounts hours after the service launched. Many of these accounts are now being offered for free on hacking forums, or available for sale for prices varying from $3 to $11, a ZDNet investigation has discovered.
A hacker, who goes by the name The Dark Overlord, announced the theft of episodes of Orange Is the New Black on Twitter early Saturday. The post included a link to an illegal file-sharing service where purportedly 10 episodes from the series’ upcoming fifth season were available for download. The Associated Press could not legally confirm the authenticity of the uploaded files.
Tweets sent Saturday afternoon from the 60 Minutes and 48 Hours Twitter handles saying their accounts were compromised are correct, the network said. The tweets said the network is working with Twitter to investigate. On Saturday night both accounts were suspended and inaccessible.
NBC.com was hacked into on Thursday morning, said security experts who believe the site might have have infected visitors’ computers with malware. The site is back up now. But cyber security researchers cautioned against visiting the site on Thursday afternoon, saying the malware that many Web browsers warned visitors of could be used for fraud or spying.
A rash of attacks have forced media companies to rethink relatively porous online security measures.
Exclusives
PBS officials say hackers have cracked the network’s website, posting a phony story claiming dead rapper Tupac Shakur was alive in New Zealand, and a group that claimed responsibility for the hacking complained about a recent Frontline investigative news program on WikiLeaks.
