Case Study: Political Hacking

The reasons for hacking are pretty varied. Real monetary rewards for hacking have been escalating in the past few years. Social and political hacktivism has also been on the upswing. In a recent case of political hacktivism, the Twitter account of Fox News Politics (foxnewspolitics) was hacked by the group named Script Kiddies.

On July 4, 2011, a tweet went out: “Breaking News: President @BarakObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It’s a sad 4th for #america #obamadead RIP” (See the news article from the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/04/hacking-twitter-feed-fix-news.)

Considering that Fox News leans right and to the conservative Republican Party in the United States, this tweet was a direct attack on their political positions. The attack was directed toward Fox News’ brand and reputation.

What Went Wrong?

Although no money was actually lost, this form of attack is prevalent. Hacktivists have more opportunities to spread their message by hacking into social networks that do not have a history of implementing good security protocols.

However, the Script Kiddies did not hack into Twitter or another web application in this case. They left no smoking gun as to how the hacktivists got into the Twitter account. Fox News says they are working with the Secret Service and Twitter to find out what happened. It could have been an easy-to-guess password. A user of that account may have shared it with someone or posted the password in a file that was stolen by the hacker group. When companies do not share information on these attacks, it makes it harder for others to learn how to better protect themselves.

How’s JAG Doing?

How is our company JAG Consumer Electronics doing when it comes to threat management? As we reviewed in Chapter 2, JAG really hasn’t put together too many business processes and tools for social media. From a threat management perspective, JAG does have your typical IT security tools in place. JAG runs an IDS solution; they have a disaster recovery plan with some business continuity scenarios mapped out; and they read the typical security news portals such as Securityfocus.com. JAG does a decent job in terms of IT infrastructure security threats, but the company does not have social media tools in place to identify brand threats. JAG has antimalware and antispyware in place but does not monitor user interaction with sites such as Facebook, so it knows what users are doing and what applications they may be installing. Like many companies, JAG has not implemented a process for the evolving threat that social media networks pose to corporate environments. Can JAG address the changing landscape and be proactive in identifying social media threats?

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