Twitter Target

Many financial institutions and other companies have started to rely on Twitter as a trusted channel for communication, so it was odd to see an official Fox News account fall victim for about 10 hours before the company regained control.

The Twitter account, @foxnewspolitics, was taken over Monday morning and posted fake news reports of an assassination of President Obama, the Times reported Tuesday. In all, six messages were posted reporting (in somewhat graphic detail) that the president had been shot in Iowa. Of course, he hadn't actually been shot and was spending the holiday weekend with his family at Camp David.

A group that calls itself Script Kiddies may be responsible for the hacking incident, according to the outgoing editor of a student magazine at Stony Brook University on Long Island, the article said. This group posted a message to its own account, claiming credit for the hack, even before the bogus assassination reports appeared on the Fox account. However, it did not admit to posting the false reports.

The group said it focused on Fox because it believed the organization would have lax security, according to the editor.