- Oct 23, 2012
- 12,527
A number of high-profile websites have been hit by a cyber-attack apparently conducted by the Syrian Electronic Army hacker collective.
When landing on the pages of the affected websites, the visitor receives a pop-up message saying “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).” Navigating to any part of the website is not possible and the only action permitted is acknowledging the hack by pressing the OK button in the message, which loads up an image with the SEA logo.
Among the affected websites are The Independent, OK Magazine, The Telegraph, London Evening Standard, America’s National Hockey League, The Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and NBC.com. Administrators have fixed the problem on most of the websites, except for NBC.com, which cannot be accessed at the moment of writing.
It appears that the cause of the outage has not been pinpointed in neither of the cases. The Independent put the blame on the Gigya comment platform, although not all the websites use it; glitches in the content delivery network (CDN) and the ad network have also been suspected.
Even if all clues point to an attack carried out by the Syrian Electronic Army, the hackers have not claimed responsibility for any of the incidents, yet.
When landing on the pages of the affected websites, the visitor receives a pop-up message saying “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).” Navigating to any part of the website is not possible and the only action permitted is acknowledging the hack by pressing the OK button in the message, which loads up an image with the SEA logo.
Among the affected websites are The Independent, OK Magazine, The Telegraph, London Evening Standard, America’s National Hockey League, The Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and NBC.com. Administrators have fixed the problem on most of the websites, except for NBC.com, which cannot be accessed at the moment of writing.
It appears that the cause of the outage has not been pinpointed in neither of the cases. The Independent put the blame on the Gigya comment platform, although not all the websites use it; glitches in the content delivery network (CDN) and the ad network have also been suspected.
Even if all clues point to an attack carried out by the Syrian Electronic Army, the hackers have not claimed responsibility for any of the incidents, yet.
