14 DAY TRIAL // The official website of the US army (army.mil) is currently down after hacker outfit Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) attacked it and dropped pop-up messages accusing military commanders of training Syrian rebels.
SEA is well known for its stance against media publications reporting on the conflict in the region and for cyber-attacks against such organizations.
In May, the hackers took a swing at the mobile version of the Washington Post, serving propaganda to whoever visited it. In January, the group managed to post messages on Le Monde’s Twitter account, and in November 2014, SEA attacked multiple major online publications.
Hackers plant pop-up messages on the website
This time around, the hackers defaced the US military website via Limelight Networks, the content delivery network (CDN) used for distributing web content to multiple devices across the world.
To prove it, SEA posted on its Twitter account a picture of the Limelight control panel used by the US Army Office of Public Affairs to manage the US army website.
To make the attack visible to any visitor of the site, the hackers planted a popup with the following message: “Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting.”
Additional messages were seen on the website when it was still up, including “Stop training the terrorists” and “Your government is corrupt don't listen to it!”
US Army admits taking a cyber hit
According to Fox News, Army Brig. Gen. Malcolm Frost acknowledged in a statement that hackers compromised a service used by Army.mil and that appropriate preventive measures (taking the site offline) were taken to make sure that data belonging to the army would not be accessed, although the web resource is considered a declassified one and public.
Syrian Electronic Army are supporters of president Bashar al-Assad, but they never admitted being under the employment of the government.
One of #SEA messages left on the US Army website. #SEA #USArmy pic.twitter.com/jIA7HN9jXt
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) June 8, 2015