The Website of Washington Post Hacked by SEA

Washingtonpost.com reported on 15th August, 2013 that its website was disrupted on the morning of Thursday (15th August, 2013) by a hackers gang known as Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) which is sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and launched coordinated web attacks on US news outlets.

In a tweet on Twitter sent by SEA on Thursday 15th August 2013 claiming that it (SEA) hacked the websites of the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and CNN 'in one strike'.

The tweet also specified that The Washington Post's website was hacked through 'Outbrain', an advertising network which The Post uses to suggest other news stories that patrons might like depending on the profiles of user.

According to Outbrain.com, the breach occurred due to a phishing attack from an email sent to their CEO's account initially.

"On the August 14th's, (2013) evening a phishing email was delivered to all workers of Outbrain impersonating to be from its (Outbrain's) CEO. It led to a webpage asking Outbrain workers to input their sensitive details to observe the information. Once a worker had exposed their information, the attackers were able to penetrate our (Outbrain) email systems and recognize other crucial details for accessing through some of our (Outbrain) internal systems," the company stated in a notice to the customers, as published by csoonline.com on August 15, 2013.

Buzzfeed.com published news on 15th August, 2013 quoting Daniel Cohen, Head of Online Threats Managed Services at RSA which is a computer and network security company as saying "the hacking which infiltrated Outbrain could have infected thousands - possibly millions of users with potentially harmful malware.

The attack on the Post is the latest in a series of attacks against media and social sites during the last year or so. In addition to this compromise of the Post, SEA has also claimed the credit of hacking the Twitter accounts of The Onion, the Associated Press and others. The group has been attacking various media organizations for some time now due to which the home page of New York Times going offline for about two hours on 14th August 2013 although the company claimed that the failure was due to bad update rather than an attack.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/24/2013