14 DAY TRIAL // The Syrian Electronic Army has attempted to hijack a number of major websites – including Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook – after hacking into the systems of domain management services provider MarkMonitor.
It appears that MarkMonitor mitigated the attack before the Syrian hacktivists could cause too much damage. However, screenshots posted by the Syrian Electronic Army on Twitter show that they’ve gained access to the MarkMonitor administration panels for Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook.
Just before MarkMonitor detected the attack and shut down its management portal to prevent the hackers from changing anything, the SEA posted a screenshot showing that they had already started changing the details for Facebook.
The image shows that the registrant’s address was changed to one in Damascus, Syria. The message accompanying the screenshot reads, "Happy Birthday Mark! Facebook.com owned by SEA."
Happy Birthday Mark! http://t.co/yWBwvXPGRZ owned by #SEA http://t.co/gk8nGxATLt pic.twitter.com/eAeGp1TvBF
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) February 5, 2014
When asked by TNW, MarkMonitor refused to confirm or deny that these companies are its customers. However, back in 2012, when hackers of UGNazi claimed to have gained access to Google’s MarkMonitor account, the company told Softpedia that they protected the domain name portfolios of the most highly trafficked sites, so they took security very seriously.
At the time of writing, Facebook’s registrar data appears to have been restored.
