Reuters blog hacked again

The journalists' blog from the Reuters news agency has been hacked again, for the second time in less than two weeks. This time a false report was published to the blog stating that Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal had died.

After the false story was discovered, the news agency immediately deleted it and later took the blog offline citing "technical issues" as the reason for the outage. In its report about the latest breach, Reuters says that it has "no immediate information on who was behind the hacking".

Earlier this month there was a similar breach that resulted in false reports about the situation in Syria being published. The British news agency has yet to confirm how the unidentified perpetrators were able to break in and post these stories; however, some believe that it was because Reuters is using an outdated version of the WordPress blogging platform.

Following the first breach, a leading WordPress developer told the Wall Street Journal that the site was running version 3.1.1 of WordPress at the time, which contains a number of publicly known vulnerabilities; the current stable release is 3.4.1. It is not known whether Reuters upgraded its WordPress software after taking the site down the first time or if the intruders were able to break in the second time by using other means, such as a security hole in a plugin or some other vulnerability.

(crve)