Syrian Electronic Army hits FOX TV networks through compromised Hootsuite account

Syrian Electronic Army hits FOX TV networks through compromised Hootsuite account

The Syrian Electronic Army has claimed responsibility for another attack on media outlets, this time through a Hootsuite account associated with at least two international FOX television networks.

The incident was first reported by Matthew Keys’ The Desk:

The Syrian Electronic Army compromised a Hootsuite account used to post content to several international FOX television networks, the group confirmed to The Desk Tuesday afternoon.

The Hootsuite account was used to post pro-Syria messages on the Twitter accounts of FX Australia and FOX TV United Kingdom.

A member of the SEA who goes by the name Th3 Pr0 told The Desk a colleague had access to over 200 Twitter and Facebook profiles associated with the compromised Hootsuite account.

Today’s incident comes just over a week after the group defaced the recruiting website of the US Marines. SEA had posted photos of individuals dressed in what appeared to be US military uniforms holding signs with messages opposing a strike on Syria.

U.S. Marine Corps spokesman Lt. Col. Neil Murphy told ABC News on Monday, “We believe the photos are illegitimate.”

“We do not know the identity of the person in the photo, however, we are confident that the photo is part of a disinformation campaign that was part of a targeted ‘cyber redirect’ last week,” Murphy told ABC News.

The photos had been circulating on various forums and social media sites for a couple days before being tweeted by the Syrian Electronic Army and then used in the website defacement.

Meanwhile, another pro-Syria group of hackers called the Security Lions Hackers has hit several websites, prompting some outlets to associate those attacks with the SEA, which may not be the case.

On Monday, the Reporter-Telegram said it was the victim of a cyberattack after the DNS information was edited to redirect users from a forum operated by the outlet to a pro-Syria message from the Security Lions Hackers.  While SEA has been blamed for the incident, it doesn’t seem likely to be associated with the attack.

The Reporter-Telegram was the latest hacking victim of the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad hacking group, Monday afternoon.

[…]

The loosely knit group of cyber warriors edited the DNS lookup information to redirect users from MyOpenForum.com, a bulletin board the Reporter-Telegram maintains, to a pro-Syria propaganda website. The attack took place sometime in the early afternoon. As of 5:30 p.m. the edited code was still embedded in the website and Internet technicians were working on the issue.

And on Saturday, the website of the United States College Hockey Organization was replaced with a similar message, also from the Security Lions Hackers.  As Matthew Keys reported, that attack was erroneously attributed to the SEA.

The SEA is usually up front (and often quite vocal) in taking credit for the attacks it executes.  It has denied responsibility for the US College Hockey Organization, and SEA so far doesn’t appear to be aware of the Reporter-Telegram attack.

As Eduard Kovacs, who reports on security news at Softpedia, wrote in August, experts have warned that Syrian Electronic Army is not the only pro-Assad hacker group.

The Syrian Electronic Army has been responsible for numerous high profile attacks, and frequently targets Western media outlets.  Most recently the group made headlines for disrupting the websites of the NY Times, Twitter and The Huffington Post UK after a phishing attack on a DNS registrar associated to those outlets.

The FBI issued an advisory about SEA on August 30th, 2013, shortly after the hacking group warned that it may retaliate if the US launched a military strike on Syria.

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