Syrian Electronic Army hacks several sites in UK and US

28 Nov 2014

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A group identifying itself as the Syrian Electronic Army has hacked several news websites including CNBC and The Telegraph of the UK, Bloomberg reported. Other media organisations affected include CBC News, the UK-based The Independent, the London Evening Standard and the New York Daily News, as per reports on the companies' websites and Twitter accounts.

The Syrian Electronic Army, which backed the country's president, Bashar al-Assad, had earlier targeted The New York Times website and also claimed responsibility for hacking Washington Post and Financial Times last year, redirecting readers to its own websites and videos.

According to Raj Samani, chief technology officer for for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at network security provider McAfee Inc,  this was the group's modus operandi and it was successful at big and loud campaigns like this.

A number of users of the sites were presented with a message telling them that they ''have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.'' The Independent's news site said, ''the nature of the attack is still unknown - and it is unclear whether the sites themselves are under attack, or the devices of those accessing them.''

Samani said this was a fairly straightforward hack.

Meanwhile, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Gigya, a third-party US company which provided commenting and sharing services, had its domain registrar breached, resulting in several websites pointing to a new website, operated by the Syrian Electronic Army, when people tried to access them.

Among other sites affected were Forbes, The Independent, The Chicago Tribune, Italy's La Republica and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Dell, Microsoft, Ferrari and humanitarian organisation Unicef were also targeted.

People who attempted to access certain parts of the attacked websites found the hackers had left a message that read "You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)." They were then redirected to the group's logo, an image of an eagle bearing the Syrian flag and a message in Arabic.

According to Gigya company's chief executive Patrick Salyer at no point was any user data compromised.

He added, there had been no compromise of either Gigya's platform itself or any user, administrator or operational data. He added, not operational data had been compromised and it was never at risk of being compromised.

He added, rather the attack only served other  JavaScript files instead of those served by Gigya.

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