Syrian Electronic Army hijacks Israel Defense Forces Twitter account

Security message: Forbes.com was targeted in a digital attack and our publishing platform was compromised. Users' email addresses may have been exposed. The passwords were encrypted, but as a precaution, we strongly encourage Forbes readers and contributors to change their passwords on our system, and encourage them to change them on other websites if they use the same password elsewhere. We have notified law enforcement. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to the members of our community for this breach.The hacking group posted a handful of tweets from its SEA Twitter account regarding the incident.
The Syrian Electronic Army has hacked Vice.com and deleted the article titled “Is This the Leader of the Syrian Electronic Army?” They’ve also altered the website so that visitors of vice.com/en_us would be redirected to sea.sy, the hacktivists’ website. “Your website was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. This time we just deleted the article that you claimed in it that you exposed “Th3Pro” identity. But you didn’t. You published names of innocent people instead,” the hackers wrote in an article published on Vice.com. The hackers threatened Vice in late August 2013. They claim to have gained access to Vice’s systems two days after the article about the identities of alleged members had been published. However, they say they’ve postponed the attack until now because at the time, Vice was aware of the fact that they might be targeted.The hacker group posted a screen shot of the administration panel of Vice’s presumed content management system (CMS) to its Twitter account.
The account for a link shortening service connected to the Obama support organization Organizing for Action (OfA) was reportedly compromised today. Shortened links in President Obama's Facebook and Twitter postings were in turn briefly redirecting readers to a video with pro-Syrian regime propaganda. The pro-Assad...
Several websites with the Qatar (.qa) domain extension have been restored to normal after being disrupted by the Syrian Electronic Army this weekend. The hackers targeted the Qatar Domains Registry and altered DNS records for several high profile domains, according to Softpedia, then defacing pages...
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...
The Syrian Electronic Army seems poised to stir up trouble as the world continues to debate over what to do about Syria. The pro-Assad group of hackers posted this cryptic tweet earlier today. https://twitter.com/Official_SEA16/status/375899857988243456 The group warned last week that it may retaliate using “methods of causing harm”...
The Syrian Electronic Army is claiming credit for defacing the recruitment website of the US Marines. https://twitter.com/Official_SEA16/status/374427649193439233 Marines.com, which is operated separately from the official Marines website, was changed in the early morning hours on Monday to display a message from the hacker(s). The message told US...
The Syrian Electronic Army, which has been grabbing headlines in recent days after its attack that disrupted the NY Times and Twitter, says it may retaliate using "methods of causing harm" for the US economy if the US strikes Syria. From ABC News: "When we hacked media...
As an outage of the New York Times website stretched into its second day Wednesday, evidence continued to mount that it was the result of an attack by the Syrian Electronic Army. The group, loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, has been behind multiple attacks on media websites in recent months and, on Twitter, took credit for a sophisticated hack that had hobbled the news site for roughly 20 hours. "The @nytimes attack was going to deliver an anti-war message but our server couldn't last for 3 minutes," the group posted on its Twitter feed at about 9:40 Wednesday morning.
The NY Times experienced an outage today for the second time in two weeks. On August 14th, the issue was said to have been an internal issue. But today, the issue was characterized as something more malicious. And that may not be the only target,...
The Syrian Electronic Army is claiming credit today for hacking content recommendation service Outbrain, which appears to have affected several media outlets that include TIME, CNN and the Washington Post. https://twitter.com/Official_SEA16/status/368038668709019648 Outbrain has confirmed the attack (without mention of SEA). https://twitter.com/Outbrain/status/368044125536272386 The Washington Post also confirmed its disruption this...
The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army hit two more targets Tuesday, after claiming it had hacked the website and database of Viber, an Israeli-based VOIP phone service/messaging application, and the popular internet news site The Daily Dot. SEA tweeted a warning for Viber users to delete the...
There is a term known as “newsjacking,” and it refers to the takeover of a news story or narrative and using it for other purposes. See the example in that link about when Oreo took over the power outage during the Super Bowl 2013, and...
Speaking at a lecture on Saturday in the southern city of Beersheba, Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, Israel's former cyber security adviser, said that a group calling itself "The Syrian Electronic Army" had launched the failed attack two weeks ago.The Syrian Electronic Army however, maintains that it succeeded in infiltrating the network, in response to recent Israeli strikes. In an email to Softpedia, the group stated:
“We would like to announce that in response to the unfair and illegal attacks, taken place by Israel on DATE, SEA has penetrated one of the main infrastructural systems (SCADA) in Haifa and managed to gain access to some sensitive data. Also SEA is now able to cause irrecoverable damages to the Israeli's infrastructural systems,” the hackers said. The breach comes in response to the recent Israeli strike on a Damascus research center. “This message carries a serious caution to the Israeli statesmen. They should know that not receiving a quick reaction to such childish ventures, does not show the Syrian inability in doing so, but it is based on wisdom and humanity considerations. We do not approve of killing civilians and innocent people as this is an Israeli type of solution instead,” they added. “Also an advise to those who left their homelands for many years, dreaming a happy and safe life, deceived by politicians whose deed is much far than their slogans; Do the best to express your objections to Israeli policies, since we do not like to see innocent people getting killed in Texas, US, but this time in Haifa.” To demonstrate their attack, the hackers published a PDF file that contains screenshots of what appear to be SCADA control panels.This news also comes on the heels of yet another #OpIsrael campaign, in which a variety of hackers claiming association to the Anonymous collective targeted various Israeli government websites. Like its predecessor, the recent campaign also largely failed, with little damage to any major websites and only some minor defacements to a number of seemingly random small businesses and organizations. A group of pro-Israel hackers claimed to have recently unmasked several of the individuals behind the latest #OpIsrael attacks. Given that Anonymous is a leaderless movement, it is entirely possible that the actions of that particular group were a rogue operation conducted while hiding behind the banner of Anonymous. There is no known association of any of those to the Syrian Electronic Army. Meanwhile, the Syrian Electronic Army has also been busy hijacking the accounts of news outlets, most recently that of ITV News on Friday. While the SEA's selection of targets and its messaging, which usually consists of odd jokes mixed in with pro-Assad political propaganda, may seem like nothing more than "lulz" to some, there is a more serious side to the group's actions.
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