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News agency Reuters has been hacked for the third time this month. This time the culprits posted a bogus report claiming the Saudi Arabia foreign minister had died.
The first hack came earlier this month when a Reuters correspondent blog was hijacked and a fake interview with a leading Syrian opposition figure posted. It falsely claimed the Free Syrian Army was preparing to withdraw its troops after suffering heavy losses.
A couple of days later, a Reuters Twitter account dedicated to tech news was hijacked, renamed as if it were reporting Middle Eastern news, and then used to post more fake stories suggesting things were going well for the Syrian government and poorly for the opposition.
Rather bizarrely one of the tweets claimed that Hilary “Clinton vows ‘to make Egyptian [sic] pay a heavy price’ after being humiliated with chants mentioning moniker.”
The latest hack again involved the correspondent blog, which may be running on an outdated version of WordPress that has known security flaws. As of last week, the site was still running on version 3.11, which has been outdated since July last year. Reuters hasn’t commented on whether this played a role in either of the site hacks or if the offenders found another route in.
At the time of writing the blog section, which allows correspondents to write personal opinion pieces, was offline completely. A note said that the section was “encountering technical issues.” However, Reuters staff have confirmed a false article was posted and has now been deleted.
This time the bogus report said Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal had died. Though covering a different country, this report is consistent with the previous hacks as Saudi Arabia has spoken out in support of the Syrian opposition.
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