Sunday, July 10, 2011

Hackers steal over a million emails from Washington Post jobs site

          Passwords, job accounts safe, says Jobs site. The Washington Post has said that the database of its jobs site had been breached by hackers who stole about 1.27 million users' IDs and email addresses.

          The company said on its website that the Washington Post Co's jobs website was breached twice last month. Washington Post said it took immediate steps to shut down the website after discovering the attack quickly. It said that about 1.27 million users' IDs and email addresses were affected, but added that the hackers had not accessed passwords or other personal information of users.

          The company said the jobs accounts of users also remain safe. The company also said that the incident is being probed by authorities and a security audit of the jobs site is also underway. This is the second time hackers have targeted a media company this week. On 4 July, hackers who call themselves ''The Script Kiddies' hacked into the Twitter account of US broadcaster Fox News. The hackers then falsely posted messages on the behalf of Fox News declaring that President Barack Obama had been shot dead. The @foxnewspolitics tweet read, "BREAKING NEWS: @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much."

           A representative of the hacker group told Think that they were like another popular hacker group Anonymous. The representative said, "I would consider us to be close in relation to Anonymous, 2 of the members of our group were members of Anonymous. I was a member of Anonymous," adding "We hope to be working with them soon." The hacker said, "We are looking to find information about corporations to assist with antisec. Fox News was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting."

          The US Secret Service has said that it will investigate the Twitter hack.

0 comments:

Post a Comment