Hackers using the Syrian Electronic Army had simultaneously targeted websites owned by CNN, Washington Post and Time by infringing Outbrain, a firm which issues content suggestions on those sites, as reported by Reuters on Thursday.
The Syrian Electronic Army is an online group that supports President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and has been associated to several high profile attacks. The SEA has taken credit for a series of attacks that targeted media websites that it seems compassionate to Syria’s rebels. Twitter feeds of The Al-Jazeera English, Associated Press and the BBC are among the sites SEA claimed to have hacked.
The hacking events happened a few days following a phishing attack which tried to get password information, said Washington Post Managing Editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz in an interview with CBC News.
He added that the hackers had successfully take on a personal e-mail account of one of the newspaper’s staff writers. The e-mail account was then used to deliver a SEA message.
Garcia-Ruiz also said that as divulged in a SEA’s Twitter message, the hackers were able to gain access to parts of the newspaper’s website by hacking Outbrain, an internet company that alerts blog readers and media sites to suggest links targeted to certain interests, one of its business partners.
Outbrain tweeted that its website was turned off because of the attack.
Security firm Veracode’s chief technology officer Chris Wysopal told CBC News that he believes that hackers will progressively opt to go after third-party providers because their security tend to be more sloppy than of their customers.
He added, "As the Internet becomes more interconnected, this risk is going to increase.”
However, CNN, Time – both owned by Time Warner – and the Washington Post all claimed that their web sites have not been affected by anything aside from the attack on Outbrain.
