The Syrian Electronic Army is at it again: The Financial Times has confirmed that its website and Twitter accounts were hacked by the SEA in the latest attack by the organization.
Foreign media outlets have been the primary focus of the SEA since it shifted its focus away from government sites with the hopes of garnering more attention for its efforts. Considering the SEA’s series of tweets in the last couple of weeks, we’ve expected a monumental shift toward a new strategy. But from the looks of it, the SEA is back to hacking more “serious” mainstream news outlets, after hacking The Onion, taking on the Financial Times’ page and displaying the headline, “Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.”
An attack on the Financial Times also resulted in Financial Times Twitter accounts tweeting “The Syrian Electronic Army was here.” Additional unauthorized messages written by the SEA included support of Syria’s president Bashar Assad, and defamation of the Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra by labeling the rebels as terrorists.
According to an internal Financial Times email obtained by The Associated Press, the FT warned its employees that they were likely being baited by phishing attacks and they shouldn’t open any suspicious emails.
The Financial Times has something right about the SEA. The strategy that the Syrian Electronic Army uses to attack social media and websites, are in fact phishing attacks. We confirmed that this was the hacking method that the SEA’s leader “The Shadow” other SEA members liked to employ.
With The Guardian, Associated Press, NPR, BBC, and other major news outlets victims of previous attacks, “The Shadow” told Digital Trends that the SEA has its sights set on major mainstream news outlets primarily because these attacks typically garner the attention of other media outlets.
[Screen shot via Business Insider]
