SEA Hackers Attack Huffington Post UK, Twitter and NYT Websites

Web-attackers belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army, name of a faction which acknowledges allegiance to Bashar Al-Assad, President of Syria, hacked into the websites of Huffington Post UK, The New York Times along with Twitter's twimg.com an image serving domain to compromise, deface as well as make them non-accessible to visitors on 27th August 2013, published Help Net Security dated August 28, 2013.

The attack reportedly began via one spear-phishing electronic mail that the SEA dispatched to the Chief Technology Officer of MelbourneIT that registers 'domain name system' for both NYT and Twitter. The personalized e-mail managed to sound persuasive thus duping a Melbourne reseller who voluntarily provided login details that the hackers abused. Subsequently, the intruders managed in attaining the credentials belonging to a MelbourneIT reseller with which they diverted visitors of NYTimes.com onto the specified Internet Protocol address of SEA.

Explaining in detail, experts stated that the SEA hackers had targeted numerous media organizations as well as some more high-profile entities around 2012, gained complete access to Huffington Post, Twimg.com and NYT DNS records along with a few others'. Following this illegitimate act, they managed in altering the settings in a way that instead of taking onto nytimes.com, say, the servers of NYT led visitors onto the hackers' operated website.

Officials belonging to the cloud hosting company CloudFlare, which worked towards combating the hack, described the website, whereto end-users were diverted, as containing malware for delivery.

Apparently, the Web-assault represented a usual SEA hacktivism that is basically hyping the group's political backing to sustain the governance by Bashar Al-Assad inside Syria. Senior Security Strategist Barry Shteiman of Imperva elaborated that the assault had no profit motive, but solely aimed at spreading awareness of the protest in Syria. Infosecurity-magazine.com reported this dated August 28, 2013.

Referring to the above attack, which experts described as ordinary in form while being imaginative, Security Researcher Ken Westin of Tripwire a security software firm stated that he thought cyber-assaults against media organizations appeared as increasing as also changing from infuriating, ordinary DOS (denial-of-service) assaults to complete domain hacks. Scmagazine.com reported this dated August 28, 2013.

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