Syrian Electronic Army Allegedly Hacks Several High-Profile Websites

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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A Syrian hacker group, which calls itself The Syrian Electronic Army, has reportedly targeted a number of international brands’ websites, including CNBC and other media organizations, on Thursday. According to several screenshots posted on Twitter, an error message on a number websites read: “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)”.

Screenshots on Twitter and the SEA’s website has claimed to have targeted Dell, Microsoft, Ferrari and humanitarian organization UNICEF, along with media organizations such as Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Italy’s La Repubblica. Officials suspect that the hack attack was launched through a comprisable customer management platform, Gigya, which is used by almost 700 leading brands. According to an email from Gigya, it said to be aware of being target of a hacking attempt and that some calls to Gigya domains were redirected to the hackers’ site or displayed a hacking message to end users.

According to remarks by several security experts, the hack attack has not even remotely compromised any website, but in effect, it only redirected users to dummy pages created by the SEA. Managing director of cybercrime at investigations firm Kroll and former FBI agent, Ernest Hilbert, stated that “it is PR move to show they have the skills, but what they are doing is not dramatically sophisticated.” Hilbert stated that “this is a defacement of a website and they redirected traffic from the real site to a site with their stuff on it instead.”