Syrian Electronic Army tried to publish article in Le Monde

Jan 21, 2015 10:05 GMT  ·  By

The Twitter account of French newspaper Le Monde has been briefly hijacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacker group, who posted a “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie” banner.

“Je suis Charlie” has become a popular hashtag that shows solidarity after the attack of the Islamic State terrorist group on Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris at the beginning of January.

Le Monde editors fall for email phishing

However, SEA’s message was not in support of the terrorist act, and the reason behind it is that the newspaper and the French government allegedly support terrorism in Syria.

“The Syrian Electronic Army condemns terrorism in France, but @LeMondefr and French government supported terrorism in #Syria,” the hackers tweeted one hour after hijacking Le Monde’s Twitter account.

The newspaper lost control over the social media profile on early Wednesday morning, around 1 AM (GMT). After seeing the unauthorized message and realizing that the access password could not be changed, the decision was made to temporarily suspend the account.

It appears that prior to the hijacking Le Monde editors received phishing emails aimed at tricking them into providing the Twitter credentials; several emails have been compromised and one of them belonged to a person who managed the social media account.

This stresses once more the importance of the two-factor authentication (2FA) security measure, which requires an additional secret code, aside from the password, to be provided in order to log in; the code is sent to a device in the possession of the rightful owner, thus thwarting hijacking attempts.

Other cyber-attacks preceded the Twitter account hijacking

Before taking over the Twitter account, SEA also gained access to the newspaper’s publishing tool in attacks on Sunday and Monday, but their efforts to publish an article were thwarted; the hackers also initiated a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the publication.

Le Monde says that the hackers posted multiple messages (check image gallery below) on their Twitter feed, including one with a flock of sheep holding “Je suis Charlie” banners, as well as an image saying that freedom of expression was not better than freedom of religion.

Around 4 AM on Wednesday morning, the newspaper regained control of its micro-blogging account, with the help of Twitter teams in France and San Francisco.

Le Monde tweeted an apology to its more than 3 million followers for the fraudulent messages posted on its behalf.  

SEA posts from Le Monde's Twitter (7 Images)

SEA uses Le Monde to publish “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie” banner
Image posted by SEASEA tweets “Syrian Electronic Army was here” on Le Monde's account
+4more