The twitter accounts belonging to two mainstream media conglomerates; UPI (United Press International) and The New York Post have been hacked by a group of unidentified hackers. The hackers did post alarming pieces of news which stated that China had fired anti-ship missiles at USS George Washington and that the US Joint chief of Staff had acknowledged the attack; and as a consequence, the United States was currently at a state of war with the People’s Republic of China.
Earlier on, the same hackers had posted that an emergency meeting of the Federal Reserve was in progress in order to deliberate on negative interest rates. These pieces of misinformation pivoted on critical global military and financial concerns.
Social media account hacking and the spreading of disinformation with the intent to manipulate the strategic posture of powerful nations while concurrently using misinformation to psychologically influence the global psyche are elements of active information warfare. Moreover, repeated hacking of twitter accounts do point to the probable existence of zero-day vulnerabilities which are being leveraged by hackers.
