Syrian Electronic Army Takes Credit For News Site Hacking

New submitter ddtmm writes The Syrian Electronic Army is claiming responsibility for the hacking of multiple news websites, including CBC News. Some users trying to access the CBC website reported seeing a pop-up message reading: "You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)." It appears the hack targeted a network used by many news organizations and businesses. A tweet from an account appearing to belong to the Syrian Electronic Army suggested the attacks were meant to coincide with the U.S. Thanksgiving on Thursday. The group claimed to have used the domain Gigya.com, a company that offers businesses a customer identity management platform, to hack into other sites via GoDaddy, its domain registrar. Gigya is "trusted by more than 700 leading brands," according to its website. The hacker or hackers redirected sites to the Syrian Electronic Army image that users saw. Gigya's operations team released a statement Thursday morning saying that it identified an issue with its domai registrar at 6:45 a.m. ET. The breach "resulted in the redirect of the Gigya.com domain for a subset of users," the company said. Among the websites known to be hacked so far are New York Times, Chicago Tribune, CNBC, PC World, Forbes, The Telegraph, Walmart and Facebook.

Comments

Threat level alpha omega

[OverlyGenericUsernam]

Syrian Electronic Army has truly shown that they are a force to be reckoned with by inconveniencing a handful of websites.
I haven't really heard of them, but apparently they are a thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Electronic_Army

Re:Threat level alpha omega

[Anonymous Coward]

Syrian Electronic Army has truly shown that they are a force to be reckoned with by inconveniencing a handful of websites.

I haven't really heard of them, but apparently they are a thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Electronic_Army

Hope they don't fill my myspace page with glittery gifs. That would be embarrassing.

Re: Threat level alpha omega

[Anonymous Coward]

Syrian Electronic Army, otherwise known as Americans.

Re:Threat level alpha omega

[ladoga]

But hey, it runs Linux. :)
http://sea.sy/article/id/2048/...

Re:Threat level alpha omega

[Anonymous Coward]

This is script-kiddie level of hacking, and nothing to really be concerned about.

Point 1: None of the news sites were hacked, and the browsers were redirected using javascript inserted into an advertising unit
Point 2: Only people "logged in" to said news sites saw it. Thus the implication of the user management.

Any actual "hacking" was isolated to one site, the site being used by all these news sites user management. This is akin to the same kind of malware "update your flash player" redirects. The problem is that they tune these javascripts to not fire unless running on the third party site, so the people approving the ads, don't ever see the malware.

Like, when logged into the CBC site, you saw the hacked javascript, but if you copy-pasted the same url into a private browsing window, it didn't.

Nothing new here.

Re:Threat level alpha omega

[AK Marc]

I had the backed message pop up once for me, and I was never logged into any of the affected sites.

What

[Anonymous Coward]

the hell? Are they trying to prove something by doing this?

I am utterly quaking in my boots. They can vandalize a website that probably had security set up by the neighbor's cat!

Re:What

[Etherwalk]

Probably they get to write it up as a victory in their funding request. Either that, or somebody drastically overestimated the effect it would have--But they got it wrong in a few ways. (I will not speculate on exactly how. Certain discussions are better not shared with, you know, the Syrian Electronic Army when they happen across slashdot.)

There are lots of targets that would be really smart to go after if you wanted to get the attention of the average american and/or hurt the US markets. But this op... not so much.

What hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sure as heck didn't work very well. I see no evidence that the CBC website ever stopped working properly today for anyone.

Re:What hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sure as heck didn't work very well. I see no evidence that the CBC website ever stopped working properly today for anyone.

It didn't. All you had to do was hit the stop button just before the page finished loading and that disabled their pretty lil pop-up message . It also only came up on certain articles and not at all on the main page. I had honestly never heard of these guys before today, and I'm pretty sure I won't remember them tomorrow.

Oprahs site got hacked as well

[angel'o'sphere]

http://www.oprah.com/

Since hours actually and seems no one has noticed there yet or they are unable to fix it, or I get a cashed version of the site.

(And please don't ask me why I visited that site ;) )

The Independent hacked too

[UpnAtom]

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

(how could I not click on that one?)

Hack relies on Javascript.

tomshardware.com

[Anonymous Coward]

"hacked"

evil shit

[PopeRatzo]

Gigya.com, a company that offers businesses a customer identity management platform

A "customer identity management platform".

That means, you're not the consumer, your the consumable. Could it sound any more sinister?

I was about to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

When did the SEA get into global public service announcements?

Focus on ISIS instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't an Syrian Electronic Army be focusing on enemies of the Syrian Government, like ISIS? Why attack western web sites?

Re:Focus on ISIS instead?

[ihtoit]

because the enemy of Syria is in fact Qatar's allies, like the US, the UK and Turkey.

Qatar want a gas pipeline to Europe. Turkey doesn't want it passing through its Eastern desert region. Qatar already has installation rights guaranteed by US occupation forces in Kuwait and Iraq. Syria told Qatar in not so many words to politely fuck off, they're not planting a pipeline through some of the most fertile arable land in the Middle East, so Qatar asked its allies (the US and the UK) to install a pretext to aggressively insert a policing and occupation force (the next inevitable step) into Syria to quell destabilising elements (AKA ISIS/ISIL/TNGAQA (The Next Great American Quad Acronym)) which will already have established as a threat to stability in the entire region. Oh, look, that last step is the only piece of the puzzle still not in place.

OK, commence to calling me a tinpot fucking nutjob. Just remember who the fuck told you so.

Re:Focus on ISIS instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because this whole thing is a false flag by the US government, to drum up support for, something - look at the timing and scope - watch for the political manoeuvrings that follow as a result of this to see who is really behind it, watch who benefits.

Re:Focus on ISIS instead?

[dave420]

Unless you cite sources for your claims, you are indistinguishable from a tinpot nutjob, so what do you expect? If you can't be bothered to do the hard work to demonstrate your sanity, why should anyone else?

Re:Focus on ISIS instead?

[ihtoit]

offer counterargument instead of simply gainsaying, or your words fall in the same place as any AC. Into the bin with ye.

Too bad Canadian Thanksgiving is long past

[Walking The Walk]

"claiming responsibility for the hacking of multiple news websites, including CBC News" - CBC being the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "suggested the attacks were meant to coincide with the U.S. Thanksgiving on Thursday" - which had very little effect on us Canadians, seeing as our Thanksgiving was a month ago. Smooth move, morons.

Syrian Electronic Army hacked DNS provider ..

[lippydude]

Headline corrected for accuracy ...

Re:Syrian Electronic Army hacked DNS provider ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet those other sites trusted the third party and allowed the security of their own websites to be compromised. They embedded content on their pages that hackers controlled.

Poor security practice by the web sites who trusted that third party as well as the third party.

Focus on ISIS instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

ISIS is a creation of the West.
1. ISIS formed in Iraq, and let's face it, the would have NEVER happened under Saddam. We say that we strive for stability in the region, but the Iraq/Syria/Iran alliance was the balance of power.
2. The West armed, trained and funded ISIS during the previous 4 years when they limited their barbarism to Syrians and were trumpeted as "moderate rebels" and "freedom fighters".
3. ISIS continues to be funded by Western allies; Saudi (Prince Bandar having even provided Sarin for the Damascus attacks), Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey and the GCC.

There actually isn't much Syria can do about this, and the government's strategy in dealing with ISIS has been effective: pull back and defend the main cities (Damascus, the government's half of Aleppo, Latakia, and especially Latakia province where the Allewite, Druze, Christians and Armenians are concentrated, which are ISIS and Al Nusrah's primary targets) and avoid spreading too thin, let Al Nursah, ISIS and the FSA fight among themselves, and then move in to pick off the winner.

What doesn't help matters is the mass disinformation being propagated by Western media -- Bashar al-Assad, regardless of what Washington thinks of him is the good guy in this conflict, the majority of the Syrian population loves him and stands behind him otherwise he'd have been ousted years ago. This isn't a civil war, but a war between Syria and foreign, foreign-backed Mujahideens, and of course, your governments have been arming, funding and training Al Qaeda for the last 4 years. SEA can't do anything about US intervention or meddling, but you, the American people could, if only you knew (or cared) what was really going on.

It's amazing if you think about it, so many people in the West think that Bashar al Assad was behind the sarin attacks in Damascus (even though having the enemy pinned down with supply lines cut off meant that there was no logical/tactical/strategic reason to do so -- haven't you noticed yet that everything ISIS does, all their press, is to provoke Western powers into intervening? Why would they do that?) because no media outlet runs the stories about how Al Nusrah operatives were caught trying to smuggle Sarin gas into Syria, by Turkish security forces, and no one ran Carla Del Ponte's (UN inspector) interview where she flat out states that there is absolutely ZERO evidence tying the chem attacks to the Al-Assad government, and that all extant evidence pointed to the "rebels".

Western media still tows the State Department line that Al-Assad is a bloodthirsty tyrant who murders his own people. Western Media very much is an enemy of Syria.

Declaration of bias: I am a Syrian expat.