SOCIAL MEDIA FIRESTORM Hacks, attacks and alerts from Firestorm AP Hack: Following last week's attack of the AP Twitter account (view our recorded webinar for more on this), Twitter accounts belonging to The Guardian newspaper have fallen at the hands of hackers belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army as well. Within minutes of the AP attack, the message was retweeted 3,000 times, markets dropped by $136 billion in value and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted almost 150 points before it was reported as a hack by AP Corporate Communications. This most recent Guardian attack, as detailed by the NakedSecurity Sophos website, "the hackers have been making a habit of breaking into high profile Twitter accounts in recent weeks - their attack on AP's Twitter account where they posted fake news of an explosion at the White House, actually managed to cause a drop in the Dow Jones. In...

Social Media – Increasing Risk in a Crisis? From a social and merged media perspective, three recent crisis events highlight the benefits of social media use, but also clearly illustrate the very real risks to people in an active event. The first, a lockdown announced on 4/4/2013 on the University of Rhode Island Campus after reports of a person with a gun.At 12:45 pm on 4/4/2013, the University of Rhode Island (URI) announced via SMS, Twitter, Facebook and a message on its website that they were "... investigating reports of a man with a gun in or around Chafee Hall on the Kingston campus." The school posted a warning on its website: "Stay away from the area. Seek shelter in a secure location until the incident is resolved." In a subsequent message posted however: "Due to extraordinarily high volume, our homepage is not accessible. Therefore we have replaced it temporarily so that w...

Fox, NBC and USA Today – Who’s the Next Script Kiddies Target?   Social Media Safety and Risk Management  By Karen Masullo, EVP Social Media, Firestorm Summary: USAToday’s Twitter account became the latest victim of the hacking group Script Kiddies: Unlike previous Script Kiddies hacks however, the USA Today effort apparently did not include tweets with fake news stories. Instead, the group boasted about previous hacks and encouraged people to "like" them on Facebook. You may recall we discussed a breach of the FoxNews Politics Twitter account by the Script Kiddies Hackers over the 2011 July 4th weekend. Next, NBC News found itself victim of a tasteless attack via its Twitter account on September 9th of this year. The NBC News hacks read: "Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking…more as the story deve...