SEA

 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.
 

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.

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.