Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site - Washington Post (blog)

The Washington Post's Web site was disrupted Thursday morning by a hacker group sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that apparently launched a coordinated wave of attacks on American news outlets. A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army briefly infiltrated The Post's computers and surreptitiously inserted commands that redirected readers to the SEA's Web site. The organization supports Assad, who has led a long, bloody campaign to crush a rebellion in Syria. The intrusion lasted for about 30 minutes and affected a number of foreign-news stories. "We've taken defensive measures, and at this time there are no other issues affecting the site," said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, The Post's managing editor-digital. The hacking follows a "phishing" attack by an unidentified source earlier this week aimed at securing the passwords and log-in information of e-mail accounts maintained by Washington Post journalists. The source of the attack sent e-mails to Post mailboxes that appeared to emanate from Post colleagues; the e-mails directed recipients to click a link and provide log-in data. That information could then be used by an outside source to gain unauthorized access to a computer network. Post officials believe the Syrian Electronic Army was also the source of the phishing scam. In a tweet sent Thursday morning, the SEA claimed that it hacked the Web sites of The Post, CNN and Time magazine "in one strike." The tweet indicated that The Post's site was hacked through Outbrain, an ad network The Post uses. Outbrain acknowledged a problem with its network Thursday. "Our team is working to get our system secure & up shortly. Apologize for any inconvenience," the company said in a tweet. In the past, the Syrian Electronic Army has successfully cracked administrative passwords or used phishing scams to steal usernames and passwords, said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor for Sophos. Targeting Outbrain, Wisniewski said, may suggest that the group is undertaking more sophisticated attacks. Directing an attack at a network with a wide reach, such as Outbrain, is an efficient way for hackers to target several sites at once, said Wisniewski. "If I'm looking to hack sites, if I can get into a network like Outbrain, it's probably easier than serially breaking into The Washington Post, CNN and other sites," Wisniewski said. Other hackers, he said, have targeted ad networks to deliver malware to thousands of sites simultaneously. Over the past several months, SEA has claimed credit for infiltrating the social media networks of several prominent media and human-rights organizations including The Associated Press, National Public Radio and Human Rights Watch. This week, the group also claimed it had successfully infiltrated SocialFlow, a company that helps users send automatic updates to their social networking accounts. Last year, The Washington Post and the New York Times reported that hackers — likely based in China — had targeted and infiltrated their internal computer systems to gather information on the companies and the activities of reporters. In that attack on the Post, sensitive administration passwords were compromised, giving the hackers access to a wide range of company systems. At the time, the Chinese Defense Ministry denied that the Chinese military had any involvement in the attacks. The attacks last year were different than the kind launched by the Syrian Electronic Army on Thursday. Unlike Thursday's attack, the perpetrators of the earlier intrusion attempted not to draw attention to themselves. The SEA, conversely, goes for flashy vandalization rather than the quiet data collection that The Post and the Times faced last year. In Thursday's hack, readers were redirected to the group's home page, which is in Arabic. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEpg9G8TXpi1QpZnMHp4oIi-xtM8A&url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/syrian-group-hacks-washington-post-web-site/2013/08/15/4e60d952-05bd-11e3-88d6-d5795fab4637_story.html

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