Syrian Electronic Army hacks media sites of New York Times, Twitter and Huffington Post
28 Aug 2013
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Hackers yesterday targeted media companies, including The New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post, causing them to lose control of their sites. The hackers, who support the Syrian government, breached the Australian internet company that manages many major site addresses, a report said.
The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that has previously attacked media organisations that it considered hostile to the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages.
According to security experts, electronic records showed that NYTimes.com, the only site with an hours-long outage, redirected visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went dark.
In a tweet, New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack", based on an initial assessment.
The Huffington Post attack affected mostly the blogging platform's UK web address. According to Twitter, the hack caused availability issues for an hour and a half but that no user information was compromised.
The attacks come as the US administration mulls action against the Syrian government, which has been locked for over two years in an increasingly bloody struggle against rebels.
The SEA seems to have emerged during the rise of anti-regime protests in Syria in the spring of 2011, according to All Tech Considered.
The SEA has been attacking social media accounts associated with major news organisations and human rights organisations and had successfully hacked the Associated Press' Twitter account in April. It also falsely tweeted that the White House was bombed and that president Obama was injured.
All Tech Considered said targets of the SET seem to fall into three categories - media properties, communications companies and political activists in Syria.
Among media targets, prominent names, on the list of SEA victims include the AP, BBC, NPR, Human Rights Watch, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Saudi-based broadcaster Al-Arabiya, Harvard University along with a number of Twitter accounts associated with these organisations.
Communication companies like Twitter, and previously, a free VoIP and text messaging service, had been targeted. However, as noted by Reuters, the most important targets of the SEA were likely inside Syria.
SEA spreads political propaganda supportive of Assad's regime, and when the group hacked Reuters, for instance, it posted a series of tweets linking to a pro-government cartoon.
The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that has previously attacked media organisations that it considered hostile to the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages.
According to security experts, electronic records showed that NYTimes.com, the only site with an hours-long outage, redirected visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went dark.
In a tweet, New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack", based on an initial assessment.
The Huffington Post attack affected mostly the blogging platform's UK web address. According to Twitter, the hack caused availability issues for an hour and a half but that no user information was compromised.
The attacks come as the US administration mulls action against the Syrian government, which has been locked for over two years in an increasingly bloody struggle against rebels.
The SEA seems to have emerged during the rise of anti-regime protests in Syria in the spring of 2011, according to All Tech Considered.
The SEA has been attacking social media accounts associated with major news organisations and human rights organisations and had successfully hacked the Associated Press' Twitter account in April. It also falsely tweeted that the White House was bombed and that president Obama was injured.
All Tech Considered said targets of the SET seem to fall into three categories - media properties, communications companies and political activists in Syria.
Among media targets, prominent names, on the list of SEA victims include the AP, BBC, NPR, Human Rights Watch, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Saudi-based broadcaster Al-Arabiya, Harvard University along with a number of Twitter accounts associated with these organisations.
Communication companies like Twitter, and previously, a free VoIP and text messaging service, had been targeted. However, as noted by Reuters, the most important targets of the SEA were likely inside Syria.
SEA spreads political propaganda supportive of Assad's regime, and when the group hacked Reuters, for instance, it posted a series of tweets linking to a pro-government cartoon.
