CPC site hacked w/false news release about PM's health

[The Bread Guy]

This from the Canadian Press:

The Prime Minister's Office has confirmed that Stephen Harper is alive and well this morning after hackers posted a false notice on the Conservative party website saying he was in hospital.

PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas said Harper had taken his daughter Rachel to school as usual, and had arrived on Parliament Hill in fine form.

Earlier, the Conservative party website briefly carried a notice saying Harper had been rushed by helicopter to Toronto General Hospital after choking on a piece of hashbrown.

Soudas said the website was hacked.

The notice was taken down quickly but not before it was retweeted from the Twitter account of newly elected MP Chris Alexander, and then spreading like wildfire through the Internet.

Alexander has removed the tweet from his stream, and said he was not responsible for sending out a link to the false notice.

In an email, PMO spokesman Andrew MacDougall confirmed that, indeed, Harper is as "fit as a fiddle."

The "contact" information on the party website continued to be linked to a Twitter account where someone was claiming responsibility for posting "a nice juicy release" about Harper's breakfast ....

The bogus news release, as (apparently) cut & pasted by one media outlet before taking it down (with thanks to Google's cache), attached.  Note to hackers:  PM works in Ottawa, not Toronto.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Communist and anarchist activists ­- the kind that protest G8 summits and meetings of world leaders ­- might be the inspiration behind a hack of the Conservative Party of Canada's website.

Hours after the governor general read out Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Throne Speech last Friday, an online posting from the Red & Anarchist Action Network - an anarchist and communist group - called on hackers and others to "stop Harper."

Within days, the Conservative Party's website was indeed hacked ....

Anarchist/hacker post mentioned above attached, Twitter feed referenced later in article here, and more via QMI Media here.

Worth noting, even if causation =/= causality 

 

[infantryian]

I did find it quite amusing that he "choked on a hashbrown."

 

[mariomike]

I did find it quite amusing that he "choked on a hashbrown."

Reminds me of the news story of when President GW Bush "choked on a pretzel.":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1758848.stm

"The incident comes almost exactly 10 years after President Bush's father, George Bush Snr, famously collapsed and vomited as he was seated next to Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa during a state banquet in Tokyo."

 

[masterchief]

I thought it was stupid.
If there going to hack the Conservatives website,
then why not make up something bigger, and involving something bad that they did.




Bill

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I thought it was stupid.
If there going to hack the Conservatives website,
then why not make up something bigger, and involving something bad that they did that the hackers made up.




Bill

Fixed that for you