I.T Tech Support businesses of Boston have you heard about this? The group known as “The Script Kiddies” has hacked USA Today’s Twitter over the weekend. The group was quite clever and used the USA Today Twitter account to solicit requests for future targets and even to promote its own Facebook page.
Although this recent hack seems like a bit of child’s play, it was enough to be taken seriously by the FBI. This is most likely the result of its previous hacks posted to NBC’s Twitter account. Just days before the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, the “Script Kiddies” posted news that Ground Zero was attacked to @nbcnews, yes, disgusting.
An article in Tech Crunch had this to say:
According to security expert Graham Cluley, it’s possible that the new USA Today hack involved a spyware Trojan horse, like the earlier NBC hack did. For the NBC hack, NBC News’s director of social media Ryan Osborn could have received a Trojan horse containing a keylogger via email, which then captured passwords as they were typed into his computer.
The relatively unsophisticated nature of the hacks – emailed spyware – could be the reason for the hacking group’s name. “Script kiddie” is a derogatory term in the hacker community that refers to those who use hacking tools and programs written by others to attack systems or deface websites.
The attacks while appearing simplistic have been effective. Twitter, which seems to have removed the “Script Kiddie” account for now, has a good track record for responding quickly to breaches like this but would do will to look into offering increased protections to users today.
Right now Facebook has the lead on offering security prompts, protection through additional authentication mechanisms, alerts, login approvals and even the suspensions of comprised accounts. Twitter on the other hand, is kind of breaking out the clean up broom AFTER the fact.
You can read this entire Tech Crunch article by clicking here.
