This article is more than 1 year old

Pfizer's Facebook page jacked by script kiddies

Viagra firm not hard enough to beat

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's Facebook page has been defaced by mischief makers.

The rudimentary hack, carried out by a group calling itself The Script Kiddies, resulted in the dissemination of a message saying Pfizer should be stopped because "they're corrupt and the damage they create is senseless".

The hack was captured by The Hawthorne Effect blog here. According to Paul Ducklin at Sophos, it looks as if the account was hijacked after someone managed to guess the password of a person working for Pfizer's PR firm who had access to the page.

The account has since been restored and, presumably, tightened up with a more robust password.

More and more firms are being encouraged to dip their toes into social media, but unless they learn about the basics of computer security, this sort of thing is an accident waiting to happen. This point is even more pertinent in the frequent cases where such interactions are outsourced to third-party communications agencies, as discussed in a blog post by net security firm Sophos here.

The Script Kiddies previously claimed credit for a Fox News Twitter hack that spread false rumours of the fictitious assassination of US President Barack Obama. ®

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