One week after the Twitter accounts of Burger King and Jeep were hacked, Agence France-Presse (AFP) emailed media outlets on Tuesday afternoon informing them
@AFPPhoto feed was breached. The account belongs to the news agency's photo department.
The email from AFP communications chief Gaelle Charbonnier said:
“AFP’S TWITTER ACCOUNT @AFPPHOTO WAS PIRATED TODAY AT 17:45. Any documents or images posted on this account after 17:45 are NOT from AFP. AFP is taking all possible measures to restore the normal functioning of the account as soon as possible.”
Paris-based AFP, the oldest news agency in the world, sent the email to media outlets in North America around 1 p.m. ET. Around noon ET, the company tweeted from its main account:
The Twitter account has been suspended, but photos posted on the feed continue to circulate. For instance,
one picture juxtaposes an image of the Obama family with that of several slain Pakistanis. The grisly photo claims the family was the victim of “Obama’s drones.” The accompanying email described it as: “A comparison between #Obama the family man, and his treatment of a family in Pakistan.”
Another tweet criticized the Syrian revolution:
The
@AFP Twitter feed was not breached.
PR and social media departments and agencies have
scrambled in recent days to shore up their social media accounts after hackers breached
Burger King and
Jeep’s Twitter accounts. MTV, meanwhile, took flak after faking a Twitter hack as part of a marketing stunt.
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