Syrian Electronic Army Strikes Again With News Media Website Shutdowns
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The pro-Assad hacktivist group, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), is continuing to cause major headaches for a number of high profile news websites on Black Friday (28 November) across the globe, by hacking into a comment system that many outlets all use.
The Independent website is still struggling to regain all its function as users are met with a notification saying "You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)" and then are blocked from visiting the page.
On 27 November (the day which the US celebrates its Thanksgiving holiday) The Independent, Chicago Tribune, Italian newspaper Repubblica, CNBC, Forbes, and the Telegraph, were just a few of the websites affected by the hacking.
It is believed that websites using the popular Gigya comment platform were affected by the outage after the hackers posted a picture of service, which is owned by American-Israeli company Godaddy.com, on its Twitter page.
Happy thanks giving, hope you didn't miss us! The press: Please don't pretend #ISIS are civilians. #SEA pic.twitter.com/ZXzMWbXoYp
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) November 27, 2014
The SEA have since put the following on Twitter:
We're the good guys so this was harmless but just in case the bad guys copy us, use NoScript with Firefox: https://t.co/TawKevraTo #SEA
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) November 27, 2014
They even mock the prolific number of 'popups' by using a Toy Story meme.
— Syrian Electronic Army #SEA pic.twitter.com/kxhWkAt8Th
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) November 27, 2014
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