But the hackers who planted fake news stories on Reuters’s website earlier this month weren’t doing it for fun. Reuters was caught in the middle of an “intensifying conflict in cyberspace between supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” in the words of one of its reporters, as hackers attempted to co-opt the news agency’s credibility in order to support government forces in the Syrian national conflict.

via Hijacking the news: how hackers are manipulating the press from the inside out | The Verge.