Hackers add PayPal to string of attacks
Despite the long holiday break, hackers kept up their attacks, targeting Apple Inc. and Fox News before hacking PayPal Inc. on Tuesday in the latest rash of cyber strikes.
As America celebrated its independence, hackers took control of Fox News’ Twitter account and early Monday morning tweeted six messages to @foxnewspolitics’ 34,000 followers stating that the president had been killed, according to Fox News.
The tweets, which were noticed about 2 a.m., were deleted after Twitter suspended the account about seven hours later and returned control of it to Fox News. The news outlet was unable to access the account for hours as the hackers changed the password once they were in.
The news network addressed the intrusion in an online post and said it was working with Twitter to figure out how it had happened.
“We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts,” said Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital.
Hackers hijacked the British Twitter account of PayPal in a similar fashion Tuesday. The e-commerce company confirmed the attack and said the account had been taken offline.
“The Twitter account is run separately from the PayPal U.K. site and no customer data was affected,” said Anuj Nayar, the company’s director of communications.
Hackers of the online activist group Anonymous on Sunday went after tech leader Apple and exposed 27 user name and password combinations believed to be used to access data belonging to the company.
A Twitter account associated with the hacker group sent a tweet Sunday implying that Apple could be a future target of a larger attack and linked to a document on text-storage site PasteBin with the list of user names and passwords.
“Apple could be target, too,” the tweet read. “But don’t worry, we are busy elsewhere.”
