Associated Press Twitter Account Hacked

Hackers took over the verified Twitter account of The Associated Press (@AP) today and posted 'an erroneous tweet' about an attack at the White House.

The tweet claimed that there had been two explosions that occurred at the White House and that President Obama had been injured during the attack. The hack of the Associated Press' twitter account was preceded by a phishing attempt of their corporate network.

The twitter account of the Associated Press has been suspended and currently AP is working on trying to correct the issue.

After the false tweet (confirmed false by White House spokesman Jay Carney moments after the tweet went out) was sent out, the Dow Industrial Average dropped close to 140 points. Those 'loses' were brief as the Down 'recovered' almost immediately.

The Syrian Electronic Army is taking credit for this hack, however their currently is no evidence to link them to the event. Over the weekend though, Twitter suspended the group's main account after they took responsibility for hacking "60 Minutes" and "48 hours".

Assad Sympathizers Attack Multiple BBC Twitter Accounts

Multiple BBC Twitter accounts, which include weather, Arabic and other feeds were taken over by Syrian regime supporters.

It has been confirmed by Chris Hamilton who is the social media editor for BBC news that their twitter feed was indeed hacked.

This hacking is only the latest event to happen to corporate Twitter accounts. 

The BBC has confirmed that is back in control of all of its accounts as of last Thursday by about 3 pm which is when all the inappropriate/fake tweets were removed.

The attacks were initiated early Thursday morning; during this time a phishing email had been sent to several BBC staff which could have exposed password details. 

Social engineering

These attacks are the latest to happen in a series taht has seen Burger King, Chrysler and other high profile twitter accounts get hacked. 

"The most likely source of the hack is via social engineering - someone managing to elicit the password by fooling the user who keeps the password," Professor Alan Woodward of the department of computing at the University of Surrey stated.

Due to all these hacks that are occurring  industry experts are calling for Twitter to beef up their security and offer two-factor authentication.

Thankfully this latest hack doesn't seem to have used BBCs brand name to get users to click on malicious links or sign up for any type of scams, instead being a hack done by the Syrian Electronic Army for spreading political messages about Syria. 

Remember, you should always use unique passwords for any of your online accounts that are both hard to guess and hard to crack, so they should be at  least 8 characters long and contain numbers, special characters, and alternate capitalization. The password should also be unique to that specific online account and not be used for all your accounts. 

For more information on network security and support, check out Iconic Mind.

Google Reader Shutting Down In July

According to a post on Google's blog, the company will be shutting down its popular RSS Reader Google Reader due to declining useage and an effort to focus on putting energy into fewer services. The shut down of Google Reader is part of a broader "spring cleaning" which includes shutting down Google Cloud Connect, Google Building Maker, and the blackberry Google Voice application.

Google Reader is set to shut down on July 1 giving users a three-month period to find alternative feed-reading solutions as well as to export Google Reader data via Google Takeout. 

For some suggestions as to other services that you can use, check out this article from USA Today which discusses four popular reader services to try.

For those of you who just can't imagine life without Google Reader, you can try signing this petition at Change.org that was created by Dan Lewis.