CNN’s “Political Ticker” blog was apparently hacked this afternoon. As noted by Michael Van Poppel on Twitter, a story under the byline of Melissa Gray and Dan Lothian was posted about an anonymous Bitcoin operator going out of business.
The post had a number of red flags, aside from the fact that it wasn’t even about politics. The news item was poorly written, with a number of misspelled words and grammatical errors, and it featured a graphic that was below the quality CNN would typically use. It was also back-posted to June 22nd, so that it would not appear on the first few pages of the blog.
Update from a CNN spokesperson: “A user’s credentials for a third-party publishing platform were compromised and the content of an archived blog post altered. We have corrected the issue and are working with the vendor to ensure the platform’s security.”
CNN took the story down fairly quickly, although it looks like it was on the Political Ticker blog for over an hour. We have a screengrab of the fake item below.
TV news organizations have been ripe targets for hackers in the past, who take over social media accounts and blogs with the hope of spreading false information.