Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a well-known hacking group set up in 2011 apparently hacked websites of British media organizations, which included London newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, Independent and Evening Standard. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and New York Daily News also said they had fallen victim to the hack.
Users trying to access the affected websites found 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.
Sources say that SEA did not actually hacked the affected websites directly, but instead pulled off the attack through Gigya, a customer identity management platform. A Twitter account associated with the Syrian group posted an image with a message that they have accessed the GoDaddy account of gigya.com, a company that helps businesses identify those who visit their websites. The media outlet clients of Gigya include CBC, CBS, NBC, Forbes, CNN, al Jazeera and Fox.
Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya said in a blog post “Neither Gigya’s platform itself nor any user, administrator or operational data has been compromised and was never at risk of being compromised.”
The Independent, one of the organizations whose website was affected said that to execute the attack, Syrian hackers changed the DNS (Domain Name System) entries for the Gigya domain. However, the affected companies said that their systems were safe.
Moreover, the SEA has used similar DNS hijacking techniques in the past as well to target various news and other organizations and they have clearly declared their loyalty to the government of Syria.
