14 DAY TRIAL // On Thanksgiving, the Syrian Electronic Army has managed to place pop-ups promoting its existence on a number of websites, including big ones like NBC, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, NHL, The Telegraph, The Independent and more, and the group has now claimed responsibility for the strike, although its reasons remain somewhat unclear at the moment.
The hack was not achieved directly and the group didn't managed to get actual access to the sites on which it placed its messages.
Instead, the Syrian Electronic Army used the Gigya platform to gain access, which is a service used to show and handle comments.
The hackers took advantage of GoDaddy to alter the Domain Name System for Gigya and then get to the sites and place the harmless messages.
A message on the Twitter account associated with the Syrian Electronic Army claims that the group never intended to steal data or destroy it and suggests that NoScript was a good way of making sure that the same attack did not work if another group tried it out.
The creators of Gigya have also announced that they have eliminated the vulnerability that was used in the Thanksgiving attacks.
It’s unclear whether the Syrian Electronic Army plans to focus on pure publicity stunts in the near future, promoting the agenda of al-Assad, or if the group will also try to get access to personal data and use it for its own purposes.
A hacking group with a political agenda
The Syrian Electronic Army is tolerated by the current government of the country, which is still led by Bashar al-Assad, and tends to choose to mostly target opposition groups, Western human rights organizations and media outlets.
It has been active since the start of the Civil War in Syria and it arguably achieved its highest success in April 2013, when it managed to gain access to the Twitter account of the Associated Press news agency and launched info that the White House had been bombed and President Barack Obama was injured.
Before the AP gained back access and denied the story, the stock market dropped.
Recent Twitter messages have mentioned the fact that ISIL fighters are not civilians, which is probably an attempt to portray the government as a force for good in a battle against Islamist militants.
The conflict in Syria has grown in complexity over the past few months, as the civil war in the country changed after ISIL was formed and gained significant territory.
At the moment, the Bashar al-Assad government has been fighting the terror group but also the more centrist rebels that seek to oust the president.
The United States has also intervened with airstrikes against ISIL.
We're the good guys so this was harmless but just in case the bad guys copy us, use NoScript with Firefox: https://t.co/TawKevraTo #SEA
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) November 27, 2014
