This week, MSNBC host Joy Reid has found herself embroiled in a familiar controversy. Twitter user @Jamie_Maz—for the second time—surfaced a number of homophobic posts, from the early aughts, on Reid's now defunct blog, the Reid Report. In response, Reid has turned to a recognizable scapegoat: hackers.

Reid isn't the first public figure to blame hackers for her alleged misdeeds online. Numerous celebrities and politicians have accused hackers of breaching their websites and accounts for years. It's an alluring explanation, in part because plenty of websites and organizations have suffered genuine breaches. And the general public still largely views hackers as nefarious, all-powerful cyberghosts who can reach into your computer and cause your Twitter account to retweet hardcore porn at any time.

To be clear up front, it's absolutely possible—if not entirely plausible—that Reid and some of the others below really were hacked. That's partly why the hacking excuse provides such good cover; it's a difficult crime to trace, and can be difficult to fully rule out in many cases, especially if forensic evidence has been destroyed. With that caveat aside, here are some of the best moments of hacker-blaming history.

The Report on the Reid Report

Let's start with Reid, who claims that attackers not only breached her blog, but also the nonprofit Internet Archive, which maintains the Wayback Machine, a database that automatically preserves millions of web pages to keep them from being lost to history. They did so, Reid says, to insert multiple posts that say things like "adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types."

"In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology," Reid said in a statement provided by her employer, NBCUniversal. She also said she has worked with a cybersecurity expert, Jonathan Nichols, who said in a separate statement that credentials for the Reid Report were found on the dark web. Nichols said that while investigating Reid's blog, he reached out to the Internet Archive to have the posts removed, because they were fraudulent. The Internet Archive says it didn't have enough evidence to take them down.

'There is a near zero-chance that the claims of hacking are credible.' Jake Williams, Rendition Infosec

"When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities," the organization's Chris Butler said in a blog post. "We are unaware of anyone corrupting what we have captured, or when it was captured," Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine project at the Internet Archive, said in an email.

After the Internet Archive refused to take down the posts, Reid or someone on her team ran an exclusion script on her blog, which automatically stops the Wayback Machine from archiving a site. The archives of her blog are now unavailable.

"I assess there is a near zero-chance that the claims of hacking are credible," says Jake Williams, a former National Security Agency hacker and founder of the firm Rendition Infosec. "The Internet Archive has these posts archived from multiple different nodes over a multiple-year period. While I have little doubt that Joy Reid's credentials have probably been leaked and are probably available on the dark web, this fact does not mean that she was hacked." Williams further suggests that had someone actually accessed Reid's blog, they would have probably posted something far more inflammatory than they did.

"We talk about the intersection of intent, opportunity, and capability. This attack makes no sense in the intent or capability categories. If you have the intent to harm Joy Reid, given the capabilities you must possess to modify the Internet Archive, you can do far worse," says Williams.