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March 27, 2007
ABC News' Jennifer Parker Reports: In what is perhaps a new weapon in campaign digital media warfare, the MySpace page of presidential candidate Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., was hacked Tuesday.
"All I can say right now is that we're investigating," said Matt David, a spokesperson for McCain's 2008 White House bid.
According to the webblog TechCrunch, which tracks new Internet products and sites, McCain's MySpace page profile included a pranked letter on Tuesday morning that read: "Dear Supporters, Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage … particularly marriage between two passionate females."
News of the hack spread across digital media sites today such as Newsvine, TechCrunch and TechPresident.
On his own website, the co-founder of Newsvine, Mike Davidson, claimed responsibility for pulling the prank.
Davidson claims that he designed the MySpace template that McCain is using and usually lets anyone use it for free as long as they give attribution.
However, apparently McCain didn't give him credit and Davidson sought retribution.
"I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac," writes Davidson.
Recently, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's campaign quickly fixed its official Web site to remove a design flaw that could have allowed hackers to expose personal information submitted by volunteers.
"I'm not surprised by this at all," said Andrew Rasiej, cofounder of TechPresident, a web site that tracks how the '08 candidates are using new media and the Internet.
"This just goes to show that the Internet is an entirely new battlefield for many of these candidates and they are going to have to develop sophisticated new responses to deal with them," said Rasiej.
The Internet battlefield also featured a recent proxy fight between the campaigns of presidential candidates Clinton and Obama.
Phil de Vellis, formerly an employee of the company that handles Obama's Web site, created a mock political ad casting Clinton as 'Big Sister' in a remake of the '1984' Apple classic.
The ad became a sensation on the video sharing site YouTube and it was later revealed that de Vellis formerly lived with a current Obama staffer.
