thewayne | The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA): more info about it is coming out

The SEA has been pulling off some high-profile hacks, including: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Twitter, Associated Press, etc. Mainly they do defacement of web sites with pro-Assad messages, but with getting in to newspaper's sites its wondered if they got deeper and stole reporter credential information. I expect their attack frequency to increase over the next few weeks with the debates as to whether or not to attack Syria over the chemical weapons use increases.

And they have some pretty skilled people working for them, otherwise they couldn't pull off the hacks that they have. My favorite hack of theirs has to be their attack on The Onion. Other non-English speaking countries *cough*Iran*cough* have cited The Onion as an actual, reliable, news source. Maybe that's why the SEA took it over. And the owners/editors of The Onion took it totally in stride.

As a part of international trade sanctions against Syria, several hundred domain names were seized, including those of the SEA. So they moved their domain registration and apparently its hosting to Russia. But something happened which the SEA vehemently denies: they themselves were hacked. They were totally pwn'd and their servers were copied and posted to 'darknet' Tor sites that can only be accessed through Tor browsers, said copies are now being gleefully analyzed by security professionals.

The SEA, of course, totally denies that this happened, claims their servers are 100% secure. Well, they've proven that very few servers are as secure as people would like to think that they are.

I find it quite amusing, the uber hackers getting hacked, then denying it could ever possibly happen. This word you keep using: I do not think it means what you think it means.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/08/who-built-the-syrian-electronic-army/

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/08/syrian-electronic-army-denies-new-data-leaks/