Syria

The Twitter feed of the Financial Times has been suspended after it was hacked and malicious links posted.

Both the Twitter account and website of the FT were hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group.

Stories on the FT's website had headlines replaced by ‘Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army' and messages on its Twitter feed read: "Do you want to know the reality of the Syrian 'Rebels?'" followed by a link to a video. The hacking group was a supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Its attack on FT followed a phishing attack against company staff.

Syria is experiencing an Internet outage similar to a two-day blackout late last fall, according to companies that monitor online traffic around the world.

Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer at Renesys, said his firm saw Syria's networks go offline abruptly at 6:25 p.m. UTC (2:25 p.m. EDT) on Tuesday.

When it comes to parody news site the Onion, it's hard to tell if anything it publishes is real. So, after the site's Twitter feed had several tweets on Monday saying "The Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" and other similar messages, few people batted an eyelash.

However, both the Syrian Electronic Army and the Onion have confirmed that indeed the site's Twitter account was hacked, according to The New York Times.

Last week, hackers from the self-declared Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) claimed responsibility for a takeover of the Associated Press Twitter account, and the market-moving false tweet of an attack on the White House that followed.

The incident was the highest-profile success yet for the group, which has been busily hacking Western and Arab organizations for the past two years.

But what is the SEA all about? Here’s five things you need to know.

Censorship and government monitoring aren’t the only problems facing Syrian Internet users. There have been frequent, recent shutdowns of all Internet traffic crossing the Syrian border over the last few months, accompanying dramatic changes in how the country connects to the rest of the world.

Hacktivist group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for an attack on the computer systems of the Syrian government and its evil overlord Bashar Assad thanks to which over two million emails ended up in the hands of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

As of last Thursday, the site began drip-feeding sections of the ‘Syria Files’ to its selected media partners, and given there are a total of 2.4m emails from 680 separate domains going all the way back to August 2006, it could take some time.

As the US and Europe leveled increasingly severe sanctions on Syria, Western tech companies were still working eagerly with the Assad regime and Syrian government-owned entities. This is according to e-mails obtained by Wikileaks, dating from 2006 up until March of 2012. The e-mails are now being published in waves by Wikileaks, both through its own website and through a collection of news organizations.

Hackers from a group calling itself "Syria's Electronic Army" seized the English-language Facebook page of Saudi owned television news channel Al Arabiya and defaced it. 

Revolutionaries have obtained what they claim to be personal e-mails of embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his wife. The Guardian was given access to about 3000 of these documents that activists have stolen since June 2011. 

Hackers aligned with Anonymous have exposed hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, the support ministry for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Among the exposed e-mail messages was a set of talking points for Assad's interview with Barbara Walters in December 2011.