They’re back.
The Syrian Electronic Army which have had some high profile hacks over the last little while have struck again. This time they’re going after media outlets worldwide. Here’s what the Globe And Mail said:
Media outlets and websites around the world have been targeted by a hack that caused Web users to see propaganda messages for the pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army.
Users attempting to access certain parts of the affected websites, including The Globe and Mail’s, encountered a message that read “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)” and were then redirected to the group’s logo, an image of an eagle bearing the Syrian flag and a message in Arabic.
The group hacked third party software to get access to CBC, The Globe And Mail, The Daily Telegraph, CNBC, PC World, Forbes, OK Magazine, the Chicago Tribune and the NHL to name a few sites that got pwned. The software in question was made by Gigya and it allows social sharing and data tracking tools along with content delivery network services to about 700 Web publishers. I’m guessing that someone with Gigya has some explaining to do and those in charge are not having a happy Thanksgiving. They sort of explained what happened:
“At approximately 6:45 AM EST we identified an issue with our domain registrar,” the update reads. “An initial inquiry has revealed that there was a breach at our domain registrar that resulted in the redirect of the gigya.com domain for a subset of users. The issue has been addressed and is currently propagating through DNS.”
Essentially, the hackers were able to tell Web browsers searching for Gigya.com to go instead to another URL, one that hosted an image of the Syrian Electronic Army’s crest.
All of this is typical of how the Syrian Electronic Army pulls their hacks off. Net result, the pro Assad group gets their name in the news once again and a Silicon Valley company is in damage control mode.