White House Press Corps Hacked!

Looks like @whpresscorps forgot to turn on Twitter's new two-factor authentication. Someone appears to have hacked into the account as dissatisfied tweets about that off-the-record meeting with Attorney Gen. Eric Holder yesterday began appearing around 2 a.m. HuffPost first reported the news this morning at 4:41 a.m. RESOLVED: Any Member of any "News" Organization that met with AG Holder today is no longer to be trusted as a valid news source. — WhiteHousePressCorps (@whpresscorps) May 31, 2013 The official web site was hacked, too, and replaced with a single page of links to hashtags like #Benghazi, #DOJ, and books like James Rosen's The Strong Man about Watergate and the must-read The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama's True Intergalactic Ambitions by an Anonymous White House Staffer. The hacker also posted tweets to the site that included what looks to be screenshots of visitor logs that show frequent visits to whitehousepresscorps.org from both the White House and the IRS. At the bottom of the page, the hacker posted a real (and snarky) @whpresscorps retweet from Wednesday about the Obama administration's perceived bungled handling of a "PR crisis." The hacker labeled it with the hashtag... #kicker. Of course this isn't the first time a news organization has been hacked on Twitter. Back in April someone took over @ap and posted a fake tweet about an explosion at the White House, temporarily plunging the stock market. So far, the @whpresscorps hack seems to be far more innocuous, if not downright humorous. As of 10 a.m. this morning, both the web site and the Twitter account still appear to be under someone else's control, though the last Tweet came at around 4 a.m. The best part might be that some less-discerning Twitter users didn't seem to get that @whpresscorps had been hacked. Take this post: LINE IN THE SAND: Those who attended aren't Trusted News Organizations any longer huff.to/11bqPiG — WhiteHousePressCorps (@whpresscorps) May 31, 2013 That got seven retweets. The one above? 20.

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White House Press Corps Hacked!

Justin McLachlan

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Justin McLachlan