Syrian Electronic Army hacks Skype’s social media accounts

The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker collective supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, yesterday claimed responsibility for a hack attack on the social media accounts of internet calling service Skype.

Posting the contact information of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp's retiring chief executive, the attackers wrote on its Twitter account, "You can thank Microsoft for monitoring your accounts/emails using this details. #SEA"

That message apparently referred to the revelations last year by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that Skype, owned by Microsoft, was part of the NSA's programme to monitor communications through some of the biggest US internet companies.

The group said in a message posted on Skype's official Twitter feed yesterday: "Don't use Microsoft emails (Hotmail, outlook), they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments. More details soon. #SEA"

Skype's official Facebook pages carried similar messages on a blog on its website before they were taken down in late afternoon. The group later tweeted out copies of the message "for those who missed it."

The agency's practices essentially made Microsoft and other technology companies partners in government surveillance efforts against private citizens in the US and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, after removing the posts Skype issued a statement:

''We recently became aware of a targeted cyber-attack that led to access to Skype's social media properties, but these credentials were quickly reset. No user information was compromised.''

According to commentators, though the news was just a blip on the radar as against the release of around 4.6 million names and phone numbers from the transient social media upstart SnapChat, it did, however, point out that in this age of connected social media, where a blog post sent out a tweet and a Facebook post, it does not take much to make a big splash once a high profile site was compromised.