The official mobile website of American daily newspaper The Washington Post was hacked by Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
After taking over the mobile website of The Washington Post, hackers redirected the site to one of their own sites (sea.sy).
The attack was conducted about 9 hours ago when visitors on the site were welcomed with an alert message bashing the International media and Saudi Arabia.
“You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army!” “The media is always lying.” Saudi Arabia and its allies are killing hundreds of Yemenis people everyday!”
Another message bashed the US government and blamed it for training “terrorists” to kill Syrian people.
“US govt is training the terrorists to kill more Syrians.”
A tweet from SEA shows the hackers had access to the content management system of The Washington Post.
#SEA hacks @Washingtonpost mobile site in order to deliver a message. #SEA pic.twitter.com/CDX5CKSXRk
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) May 14, 2015
https://twitter.com/SyrianFalcons/status/598943543013572609
Washington Post accepted that attack affected the Post’s mobile homepage and “some section fronts on the mobile site,” but not article pages.
Shailesh Prakash, the chief information officer of Washington Post said:
“Some section fronts on the mobile site. The situation has been resolved and no customer information was impacted.”
This is not the first time when SEA has hacked Washington Post. In August 2013, the group hacked internal systems of Outbrain, took over Washington Post, Time, CNN websites and redirected them official SEA site.
Syrian Electronic Army has a history of hacking high-profile media outlets. The group has hacked Twitter account of big fish media giant, in past official twitter accounts of UK-based The Telegraph News, ITV News London, Financial Times, twitter account of The Onion Satirical Newspaper, E!Online, 11 account of Guardian Newspaper, The Associated Press,CBS, BBC Network, German Broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s (DW) Twitter, Human Rights Watch, France 24 Arabia and France 24 Observers, Qatar Foundation’s Twitter, AFP Photo, Sky News Arabia and Thomson Reuters were hacked and used by the hackers.
