Friday afternoon, Reuters reported that its blogging platform had been compromised after being the target of a hack, and that false stories had been posted purporting to be written by Reuters journalists.
“Reuters.com was a target of a hack on Friday. Our blogging platform was compromised and fabricated blog posts were falsely attributed to several Reuters journalists. We are working to address the problem,” the news giant posted to Twitter Friday afternoon.
“A false blog posting, purporting to carry an interview with the head of the Free Syrian Army Riad al-Asaad was illegally posted on a Reuters journalist’s blog page on http://reuters.com on Friday,” they added. “Reuters did not carry out such an interview and the posting has been deleted”.
One of the stories which we assume is one being referenced, carried the headline “Riad Al-Asaad: Syrian Free Army pulls back tactically from Aleppo”.
The article falsely reported, “The chief leader of Syrian Free Army (FSA) has stated on Friday that the Syrian Free Army has tactically withdrawn from Aleppo province after severe clashes took place yesterday between the regular army and FSA.”
“Al-Asaad confirmed on a phone call to Reuters that the regular army killed 1000 soldiers of Free Syrian Army and arrest around 1500,” it continued. “He added that Syrian regular army carried out several airdrops on Friday early morning.” A cached version of the article may be found here.
The entire domain for “blogs.reuters.com” appears to be down at the time of publishing.
This is certainly not the first time a major media outlet has been hacked. In May of last year SecurityWeek reported on an incident when hackers attacked PBS.Org and posted a false story saying that Tupac was still alice and living in New Zealand.
This story will be updated as additional information develops…
