Twitter Account of NBC News Hacked

A group of hackers compromised the NBC News Twitter account yesterday and used it to tweet fake news about a terrorist attack on Ground Zero recalling of the attacks of September 11, 2011.

"Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking. More as the story develops," was the first tweet this afternoon. It was followed by two others, including one that started "This is not a joke."

The group also replaced the NBC logo to a comic and modified the 'about' section of the account as well.

NBCNews's Digital Officer Vivian Schiller tweeted confirming that their official account had been hacked, and asked followers not to retweet any of the offending messages:

A group calling themselves the Script Kiddies have claimed responsibility for the hack. The same group previously broke into the Fox News Politics Twitter account to post a bogus announcement about the death of Barack Obama.

A search for the NBC News Twitter profile shortly thereafter displayed the message "This user does not exist."

It's unclear who the Script Kiddies are. The profile for the Script Kiddies--a term used to describe novice hackers--also appeared to have been removed from Twitter.

Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos predicted that account hijinks of this sort would continue to happen until Twitter offered extra security measures for popular profiles.

"Twitter should be applauded for taking such quick action (in suspending the accounts), but isn't it time that there was better security available to accounts which have a large number of followers, or who (like media organizations) may cause public panics if someone breaks in and starts tweeting false news stories about terrorist attacks?" he wrote in a blog post. "I, for one, would like to see Twitter and other social media sites offer an additional level of authentication for those who want to better defend their accounts. I fear that, unless that happens, we will continue to see high-profile accounts hacked and brands damaged as hackers run rings around them."