The Washington Post has come under severe criticism in the past few months after publishing a series of stories which have eventually been found to be completely false.

The Washington Post publishes yet another fake news story

Their critics have suggested that this series of spectacular blunders is either due to a concerted but ultimately futile attempt at propaganda or because adequate research standards are not being met. Now it appears as though the Post has not learned the lessons of the past few months and have published yet another story which has been shown to be completely bogus.

The article, which was published under the title “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. Electricity Grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say, ” alleged that a malware code associated with a group of hackers linked to the Russian state had been detected in an electrical utility in Vermont. The article carried a quote from the senator for Vermont saying that this discovery clearly indicated that the Russians were planning to take the American electrical grid offline in the middle of winter and that this action would “most certainly kill off half the state’s population in an instant.”

Glenn Greenwald, famed for his reporting of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, took the Washington Post to ask over the story which he said employed; “all the standard tactics used by the U.S. Media for such stories: quoting anonymous national security officials, reviewing past acts of Russian treachery, and drawing the scariest possible conclusions”

However, it would later transpire that almost all of the story had been completely fabricated and the journalists working at the Washington Post had not even contacted the Burlington Electric Department to confirm the details about what had happened. The company were alarmed to hear about the disturbing allegations and were immediately forced to release a clarifying statement assuring residents of Vermont that their network had not been hacked. Instead, they claimed, a single laptop which was not connected to the system had been found to have a malware virus. There is nothing to suggest that this malware virus had any connection to Russian hackers.

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