(Newswire.net — January 3, 2017) — One of the most influential news companies in the US, The Washington Post, issued a statement to correct its claim of an article which accused Russian hackers of attacking the US electrical power grid.
After examining all the facts, the newspaper issued a statement saying that not only did Russia have nothing to do with this intrusion, but also that the malware was found on a personal laptop which wasn’t even connected to the grid.
The headline which blatantly accused “Russian hackers” of breaching the security of the US electrical power grid however has remained.
On Friday, Burlington Electric, a Vermont-based power company, raised an alarm after finding the malware code on a company’s laptop. The Washington post refereed to an undisclosed source claiming the code originated from Russia, which implied that the US power grid is at risk of remotely being shut down by Russians. The article stated that the code was found on an employee’s laptop which was connected to the US electrical power system.
“We detected suspicious internet traffic in a single Burlington Electric Department computer not connected to our organization’s grid systems,” Burlington Electric said in a statement.
After reviewing the facts, the Washington Post issued a statement saying that the early version of the story is “incorrect“.
The statement concluded by referring to the report which clearly states that “authorities say there is no indication of that so far’’ and therefore exclude the possibility of Russian hackers attacking the US electrical power grid.
The statement comes shortly after the public accused The Washington Post of spreading “fake news“ through social media. The public criticized the newspaper for being known to have a history of creating its own stories that contain ill-founded allegations. However, the story itself is sufficient to create public turmoil, diminishing the impact of an official statement in the public eye.
The Washington Post was one of the loudest in accusing the Russians of
The group, however, deleted some of its incriminating posts and The Washington Post reacted by stating that they do not “vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings”.
“Time after time after time, we are seeing this fake news coming out in the Washington Post”, a former member of the British MI5 intelligence agency, Annie Machon, told Russia Today. “And every time they put these fake stories out they have to put [out] a disclaimer afterwards. But of course, the seed is then sown,” Machon said, adding that these mistakes are actually just one part of Washington Post’s deliberate tactics.