The site FoxNewsPolitics.com, part of the online presence of the huge Fox and Fox News online presences was hacked. Malicious tweets said President Obama had been killed. Obama is actually safe on a July 4 holiday. Fox is owned by News Corp (NYSE: NWS) which is run by Rupert Murdoch
Fox announced “FoxNews.com alerted the U.S. Secret Service, which is declining public comment. Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital, said FoxNews.com is working with Twitter to address the situation as quickly as possible.”
Hacks have begun to occur with increased frequency. One recently took down the entire Sony (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation Network. Yet another caused the release of the personal data of 360,000 Citigroup (NYSE: C) credit card holders. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) GMail accounts, some of which belong to Washington officials were hacked. So was the web presence of the largest US defense contractor–Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)
Companies that allow people access to their sites, Twitter or Facebook accounts, or even cloud-based data may find that they have to decrease their online presences and curtail the amount of information that they store on servers for their customers. Either of those actions could radically change the way the internet is used in favor of the kind of closed computing which was once at the center of PC operations.
The internet’s expansion, both as a way to communicate and to store and transfer data may change considerably in a matter of months, an alteration of a system that took a decade to build. Web software security has not been able to stay ahead of the hacking community, and there is not reason to believe at this point that the problem will change
Douglas A. McIntyre
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