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NEW YORK (AP) — ABC News said three of its Twitter accounts were hacked Thursday morning, sending out profanity-filled tweets to its millions of followers.
The tweets have since been deleted and ABC News said that it "resolved the issue quickly."
The hacked accounts included the main ABC News one, which has nearly 10 million followers, and two accounts related to its morning show "Good Morning America." ABC News is owned by Burbank, California-based The Walt Disney Co.
San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. declined to comment, saying that it does not discuss individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.
Hacks of high-profile social media accounts are relatively common. In 2015, Newsweek, The New York Post and UPI's Twitter feed, as well as Twitter and YouTube accounts of the U.S. military's Central Command, were hacked. More recently, earlier this month, Duke University, BBC North America, Forbes, and Amnesty International's Twitter feed were hacked. Usually the breaches are resolved within a few hours.
One way to minimize risk of a hack is to set up two- or multifactor authentication, which requires users to enter a second form of identification, such as a code texted to their phone, when they log in.
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