14 DAY TRIAL // The Syrian Electronic Army has once again targeted CNN. This time, the hackers have hijacked the @CNN and @natlsecuritycnn Twitter accounts, various blogs, and the CNN Politics Facebook page.
The hacktivists have attacked CNN for its “lying reporting aimed at prolonging the suffering in #Syria.”
“CNN used its usual formula of present unverifiable information as truth, adopting a report by Qataris against Syria,” the Syrian Electronic Army stated. “Instead of any actual journalism, CNN turned into a loud horn calling for the destruciton of the Syria-n state.”
They added, “US Media strategy is now to hide the fact that the CIA controls and funds Al Qaeda by blaming Syria instead for their terror. The SEA will not stop to pursue these liars and will expose them and their methods for the world to see.”
On the hijacked @CNN Twitter account, the SEA published the classic “Syrian Electronic Army was here” message. However, on the @natlsecuritycnn account, they posted tweets with links to the fake news articles published on various CNN blogs.
The impacted CNN blogs are Security Clearance, The Lead, Political Ticker, Crossfire and The Situation Room, E Hacking News reports.
The published posts had titles such as “BREAKING: China dumps all bonds, declares South China Sea closed zone” and “BREAKING NEWS: US declares state of national emergency, State department reportedly out of reach.”
CNN has removed the articles published by the hacktivists on blogs.cnn.com. However, they’re still accessible via Google’s cache.
The company published the following statement on Twitter, “Some of our organization's social media accounts were compromised. We have secured those accounts and deleted unauthorized tweets.” A similar statement has been published on Facebook as well.
The Syrian Electronic Army first targeted CNN in August 2013. At the time, the pro-Syria group hijacked the websites of several top media organizations by breaching the systems of Outbrain.
This time, one of the collective’s representatives has told Matthew Keys that they’ve pulled off the attack by hijacking a Hootsuite and a WordPress account.
