On the 4th of July, hackers hit the @FoxNewsPolitics Twitter account with a fake story, and the tweets remained up for 9 painful hours. Today, @NBCNews was hit by the same hackers (“The Script Kiddies”) claiming a new attack at Ground Zero, and the tweets were gone in a matter of minutes.
The NBC News social media team, headed by Ryan Osborn, moved lightning fast, tweeting on their personal accounts — even NBC Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller and Chief WH Correspondent Chuck Todd quickly tweeted about the hack — that the tweets were fake. The extended NBC News family at msnbc, where I work, also jumped in, asking that people help debunk the tweets as they see them retweeted. We passed along Osborn’s tweet on @breakingnews, warning people about the hack. NBC’s local owned-and-operated stations helped spread the news, too.
Meanwhile, NBC quickly contacted Twitter, and within minutes, Twitter suspended both @nbcnews and the hackers’ account. About half an hour later, @nbcnews reappeared, minus the fake tweets.
It’s unclear what happened, and I’ll leave that to NBC News and Twitter to explain when they learn more (I do know that Ryan Osborn and team are very careful about password management). But it’s a great case study in responding quickly on social media. Speed matters more than ever, and in this case, it looks like the damaging tweets didn’t get far before they were knocked down.
(Full disclosure: I work for BreakingNews.com, which is part of the msnbc digital network, which is a joint venture of NBC News and Microsoft. Whew!)