Fake messages were posted on the Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press International (UPI) by unknown individuals on Friday.
The accounts were quickly restored to their rightful owners, but they had already been used to publish false news on economic and military issues.
On the New York Post's business Twitter feed, a message about the US Federal Reserve wrote about the need for low interest rates in order to avoid a market recession due to low oil prices.
The same message was posted by the UPI account, which confirmed the incident in a statement on Friday, saying that its website had also been hacked, and that the fake Federal Reserve story was published on the site under a "breaking news" banner.
A later tweet on behalf of the New York Post reports that the CEO of Bank of America says, to calm citizens, that savings accounts will not be affected by US Federal decisions.
The method used by the attackers to gain access to the two social media accounts is unclear, but the lack of two-factor authentication (2FA) as a security measure likely made it easier for so-called hijackers to simply guess the password or steal it through spear-phishing.
According to Twitter users, the fake messages were visible for at least 40 minutes before the account owners managed to stop the illegal access to their profiles.
In a recent similar episode, a hacker operating under the name CyberCaliphate hijacked the Twitter profile of US Central Command, which oversees military activity in the Middle East, with the aim of spreading propaganda in favor of ISIS.
