Category: Syria

The Syrian Electronic Army – Updates

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An (interview with a SEA activist) about the Forbes hack in April demonstrates once again the close monitoring of English speaking media by the SEA for news items that are in their view anti-Syria, i.e., anti-Assad. Interesting is the attempt to cause credibility problems (from the article linked above):

„As Andy outlined, after the hackers gained access to our publishing platform, they posted potentially market-moving stories about fake pronouncements from new Fed chair Janet Yellen, rather than articles correcting the record on Syria. SEA Wr4th says they were a “diversion [from] the real operation.” “We needed time on the server with the superadmin logged,” he writes. “Otherwise its too suspicious for that much load.” In other words, they were hoping to ramp up our traffic to distract us from the exfiltration of information that was happening as they downloaded the database of information about our users. It included only their WordPress credentials: the usernames and hashed passwords needed to sign into the platform. The fake article ploy didn’t work as a traffic distraction. A Forbes editor spotted the fakes within five minutes and took them down.

As to why the group didn’t take the opportunity it had with control of the Forbes site to post articles about Syria that counter the narrative they object to, SEA Wr4th said, “There’s no point, you were taken down the articles immediately. We planned to write something, but the time window was too small.”

Another interesting hack of CNN:

Syrian Electronic Army vs. CNN

A report on the SEA:

Report on the SEA

And capitalizing on the NSA etc discussions:

Microsoft and FBI