Mt Democrat Reporter Cole Mayer Gets Hacked

Cole Mayer sent out a Tweet on Monday morning explaining that his Twitter account had been hacked. He said, "If I sent you a DM about a free iPad or asking if a photo is of you, delete it. It's bad stuff."

He joins lofty company. Recently Reuters was hacked for third time in a month; told by WordPress to "update your software."

News broke late last week that International news agency Reuters has been hit by hackers for a third time this August. The hackers breached security to send false messages regarding the Syrian uprising via the Reuters blog and their Twitter account.

In the first breach, at the beginning of the month, a false article was posted on the Reuters blog claiming the Syrian rebel army was in retreat. Days later tweets appeared with pro-Syrian Government messages on the agency’s Twitter account. The third intruder posted an article claiming that the Saudi Arabian foreign minister was dead.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Mark Jaquith of WordPress’ security team, who remarked that the news agency were using an old version of the software, known to be less secure than updated versions.

The content-management-system used by Reuters supports millions of websites across the web and has become a target of hackers looking for poorly-protected sites, as the platform is only as secure as the user makes it. WordPress is one of the most secure content-management-systems publicly available, but as security becomes more sophisticated so do methods of infiltration.

The Mountain Democrat website is also based on a WordPress platform. It is unknown if they are using the most updated version.