Syrian Electronic Army hacks US Army website

Hackers supporting the regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad have claimed to have busted into the website of the US army.

Army.mil, the official page of US forces, is currently not accessible and pop-up boxes urging Washington to stop training Syrian rebels appear on a cached version of it.

Hackers also posted a drawing hailing the Syrian regime's army as "the defender of honour".

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a loose hacker collective aligned with Assad, claimed responsibility for the attack on twitter:

The extent of damages caused by the hack was not immediately clear.

Army Brig. Gen. Malcolm B.Frost told CBS News: "Today an element of the Army.mil service provider's content was compromised. After this came to our attention, the Army took appropriate preventive measures to ensure there was no breach of Army data by taking down the website temporarily."

The group rose to prominence following high profile attacks on Western media organisations, including IBTimes.com, The New York Times, and the Guardian in recent years.

In 2013 it briefly created panic on the stock market by entering the Associated Press Twitter account and posting a message saying that the White House had been attacked.

SEA says it aims to counter what it perceives as propaganda and "fabricated news" against Assad by Arab and Western media.

It has launched several spamming campaigns and DoS (denial of service) attacks on individuals and organisations hostile to the Syrian government and describes itself as a "group of enthusiastic Syrian youths who could not stay passive towards the massive distortion of facts about the recent uprising in Syria".

The group denies having financial links with the Assad regime despite continuing reports to the contrary.