The Syrian Electronics Army claimed responsibility for the brief attack on CNN's official Facebook and Twitter pages as well as some other official blogs run by the publication, Thursday.
The Syrian Electronics Army that supports the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad claimed responsibility Thursday, for hacking into the official social media accounts and several blogs of CNN. The able news network confirmed the attack on Friday and also said that the compromised accounts were secured and posts were deleted within minutes after the attack.
The Syrian Electronics Army, which also has an official Twitter page, said on the microblogging site that the attack was a result of CNN's "viciously lying reporting aimed at prolonging the suffering in Syria."
Tonight, the #SEA decided to retaliate against #CNN's viciously lying reporting aimed at prolonging the suffering in #Syria.
- SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) January 24, 2014
The attack on CNN's network included its official Facebook page, Twitter Feeds, and blogs for "Political Ticker," "The Lead," "Security Clearance," "The Situation Room" and "Crossfire." One of the posts on the Security Clearance blog even said that the U.S. has declared a national emergency.
As a result of the attack on the CNN network, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. ET, a series of messages were tweeted including ones like "Obama Bin Laden the lord of terror is brewing lies that the Syrian state controls Al Qaeda," and "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here...Stop lying... All your reports are fake!"
The Syrian hacktivists have a history of attacks on several well-known publications and tech companies. The attack on Skype, Microsoft's popular internet phone unit, and other Microsoft social media pages including Office blogs, was attributed to the SEA. Also, in August, the SEA claimed responsibility for a 20-hour outage of the New York Times website and hacked other media publications including the AP, The Washington Post, Reuters, The Guardian and also President Obama's official Twitter account.
In order to prevent such attacks, Twitter also introduced two-factor authentication. Despite this, the attacks continue, putting in to jeopardy all the data that big companies like Microsoft store.
