Mr Harvey said that an investigation must find out “how this reprehensible content was made public,” adding that “while the Post has made its preferences very clear in the New York Governor’s race, there is no room for this violent, sexist rhetoric in our politics. We demand answers”.
All of the posts have been deleted. The New York Post, one of the biggest New York City daily newspapers, said it was hacked on Thursday after several offensive articles and tweets were published to the newspaper’s website and Twitter account.
The articles and tweets, which were racist and sexually violent in nature, were pulled a short time later. TechCrunch is not publishing the contents of the tweets, several of which called for the assassination of politicians and public figures.
It’s believed the New York Post’s content management system, used for publishing stories and articles, may have been breached. The offensive tweets were sent via SocialFlow, a popular website plugin used to push stories to social media sites. The tweets also contained links that pointed to web pages on the Post’s website, but which were no longer accessible at the time of writing.
A spokesperson for News Corp, which owns the New York Post, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The breach comes weeks after Fast Company’s content management system was breached to push offensive Apple News notifications to readers. Fast Company pulled its site down for more than a week to rebuild its systems following the compromise. The hacker, who identified themselves by their handle “Thrax,” posted an article on Fast Company’s site describing how they found a “ridiculously easy” default password that was used across several accounts, including an administrator, allowing them access to the news outlet’s systems.
Ironically, the attack started just minutes before Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, posted a manifesto for advertisers on why he'd bought the platform and how he planned to manage it in future.
It's also not the first time the Post Twitter account has been hacked; in 2015, hackers famously took over the paper's account and posted a series of tweets indicating war had broken out between the United States and China.
Similar faked tweets that went live on Thursday included other politicians on both sides of the aisle either as the source or target of the threats.
They include disturbing posts threatening the lives of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden; accusing Texas Governor Greg Abbott of advocating lethal force at the border; and a faked threat against Rep Josh Gottheimer and family by Republican opponent Frank Pallotta.
There were also two false and defamatory quotes purported to be from New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin about his opponent Governor Kathy Hochul and New York Mayor Eric Adams which included threats of sexual violence and racist epithets.
No comments:
Post a Comment