Visitors to the news portion of Vice.com – part of an international media brand that concentrates on arts, culture and other news – on Friday evening may have been surprised by a headline that read, “Syrian Electronic Army Was Here.”
The post – which had ‘SEA' on the byline – was simply a brief (below).
A pair of tweets sent by President Barack Obama's Twitter account re-directed users to to pro-Bashar al-Assad YouTube videos Monday afternoon.
One tweet about immigration reform was supposed to send followers to an article from The Washington Post. Instead, it linked to a video montage of terror attacks, starting with the attacks on 9/11. In a statement to CNNMoney, the hacktivist group known as the Syrian Electronic Army took responsibility for the hack, claiming to have broken into the president's ShortSwitch account -- a link-shortening service.
Malicious emails, craftily disguised as breaking news from CNN that the U.S. is bombing Syria, are making the rounds online, researchers warn.
According to Roel Schouwenberg, a senior anti-virus researcher at security firm Kaspersky, who blogged about the phishing campaign last Friday, the emails actually contain shortened links leading to an exploit kit that targets vulnerable Adobe Reader and Java software.
More often, however, phishers prefer to use the “more reliable” Java exploits, he wrote.
Once more, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a pro-Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad organization, has struck on the internet.
This time, SEA hit The New York Times (NYT), Twitter, and other popular sites. Unlike previous attacks that relied on phishing attacks to gain password information from the target site's authorized users, SEA is using the weak security of the internet's master address book, the Domain Name System (DNS), to re-route internet traffic from its real destination to SEA-controlled sites.
The websites of the New York Times, the Huffington Post and Twitter were hacked by a group known as the Syrian Electronic Army which posted messages supporting the embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"Our website was unavailable to users in the United States for a period of time yesterday. The outage was the result of an external attack on our domain name registrar, and we are at work on fully restoring service," The NYT said in a message posted on its website.
The eyes of the world are on Syria these days after the country has been accused of using chemical weapons in an attack near Damascus.
The Syrian government has denied any involvement in the attack and has even allowed the UN to send a team to investigate. However, snipers shot at the UN convoy that visited the attack site.
Three White House social media staffers had their personal Gmail accounts compromised by members of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).
The accounts were compromised via a phishing attack that used emails disguised as legitimate communications from the BBC and CNN, reported Nextgov. Instead, the emails included links to fake -- but real-looking -- Google and Twitter pages, which requested that the recipients enter their log-in details. The attackers then used the stolen credentials to launch phishing attacks on other White House staffers, as recently as Sunday night.
The Twitter feed of ThomsonReuters, the global news and financial data company appears to be the latest media company to fall victim to a hijacking by the Syrian Electronic Army.
The Twitter account in question, @ThomsonReuters, has been suspended in the last several minutes. The attack appears to have taken place in the last hour. The attackers managed to Tweet links to at least seven images, mostly pro-Assad political cartoons. Buzzfeed has captured all of them here, but they’re not exactly funny, so click cautiously.
Viber has confirmed a situation earlier this morning in which Viber appeared to have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (a pro-government group of computer hackers aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).
AppleSpot originally reported on the hack that affected the Viber support page, though it was unclear the extent to which hackers accessed Viber systems.
The Syrian Electronic Army has been a rather hostile thorn in the side of Twitter, in the past few weeks the hacking collective have taken over different media outlets and trolled the many Twitter followers.
For the most part, the SEA seems to be quite effective when taking over media outlets, but the messages sent out are pretty ineffective and even counter-productive on the pro-Syrian side, especially against The Onion.
