False Air Force One Crash Reported on Hacked WSJ Facebook Page

The official social media account of the Wall Street Journal posted a headline about the disappearance of President Barack Obama’s plane over Russian airspace, days after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, SecurityWeek reports.

Flight 17 was shot down over a portion of Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists.

"BREAKING: US Air Force One crash feared as air traffic controller loses contact with pilot over Russian air space," read the message posted Sunday by unknown hackers.

A second post, published minutes later, claimed Vice President Joe Biden was preparing to address the nation in 15 minutes.

WSJ recovered the account and stated: "We are aware that our Facebook page was compromised during the last 20 minutes. We have deleted the posts and are looking into it.”

On Tuesday, the Register reported it’s unclear whether the breach is related to claims by an individual known as “w0rm” about having hacked databases owned by WSJ and Vice.  

W0rm on Monday evening posted screenshots of extracted spreadsheets to substantiate his assertions, and then offered to sell the data from both publications for 1 Bitcoin apiece.

Read the rest at ThreatWatch, Nextgov’s regularly updated index of cyber breaches.

And find out even more on “NG Cybersecurity,” our new iPhone app.  

(Image via Senohrabek / Shutterstock.com