A slew of news websites and other media organizations appear to have been hacked on Thursday in a suspected coordinated attack by the Syrian Electronic Army, an amorphous hacker collective that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, New York Daily News reported.
"Happy thanks giving, hope you didn't miss us! The press: Please don't pretend #ISIS are civilians. #SEA," the SEA posted on its Twitter feed.
"You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)," read an error message on a number of websites according to screenshots posted on Twitter. However, the authenticity of the SEA's website or screenshots posted on Twitter could not be independently verified.
Companies including Dell, Microsoft, Ferrari and humanitarian organization UNICEF were among those targeted, according to screenshots on Twitter and the SEA's website. Media organizations such as Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Italy's La Repubblica, and several British media organizations such as Daily Telegraph were also affected. The error message also appeared to some users of the Daily News and CNBC.com.
"A part of our website run by a third-party was compromised earlier today," the Telegraph said on its official Twitter feed. "We've removed the component. No Telegraph user data was affected."
Gigya, a customer management platform that is used by over 700 leading brands, has been speculated to be the central cause of the issue since it was reportedly the first one to get hacked, according to Voice of America.
But instead of maliciously compromising the websites, the hack simply redirected users to a page created by the SEA, with the image of an eagle bearing the Syrian flag and a message in Arabic, security experts said.
"It is PR move to show they have the skills, but what they are doing is not dramatically sophisticated," Ernest Hilbert, managing director of cybercrime at investigations firm Kroll, and former FBI agent, told CNBC.
"This is a defacement of a website and they redirected traffic from the real site to a site with their stuff on it instead."
Over recent years, the Syrian Electronic Army has claimed to be behind a number of high-profile cyber-attacks.
In January this year, the group claimed it had temporarily compromised the Twitter account of U.S. President Barack Obama. It has also claimed to be behind earlier attacks of media organizations including the Associated Press and The Financial Times, CNBC.com reported.
Meanwhile, the websites of companies such as the New York Times, the BBC and Microsoft have been targeted by the SEA in the past, as have Twitter accounts of other media organizations.
On its website, the Syrian Electronic Army states it was created in 2011 "when the Arab and Western media started their bias in favor of terrorist groups that have killed civilians, the Syrian Arab Army and have destroyed private and public property."
