Syrian Electronic Army | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

One of the FBI's Most Wanted Hackers who was arrested in Germany earlier this year has pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in a scheme that hacked computers and targeted the US government, foreign governments, and multiple US media outlets. Peter Romar, 37, pleaded guilty Wednesday in a federal court in Alexandria to felony charges of conspiring to receive extortion proceeds and to illegally access computers in his role as a member of the infamous hacking group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced . Romar was previously extradited from Germany on request of the United States. "Cybercriminals cannot hide from justice," said U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente for the Eastern District of Virginia. "No matter where they are in the world, the United States will vigorously pursue those who commit crimes against U.S. citizens and hold them accountable for their actions." In March, the US charged thr...

Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) Hackers have made their place on the FBI's Most Wanted List. The US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are willing to pay $100,000 reward for any information that leads to the arrest of the heads of the infamous hacking group Syrian Electronic Army. On Tuesday, the DoJ unsealed charges against three suspected members of the alleged group: Ahmad Umar Agha (aka The Pro), 22 Firas Dardar (aka The Shadow), 27 Peter Romar , 36 Agha and Dardar were allegedly involved in hacking Associated Press Twitter account in April 2013 and spreading a false rumor claiming that the White House had been bombed, injuring President Obama. This caused a temporary stock market dip. The two hackers allegedly engaged in a long-running cyber-propaganda campaign in support of the Syrian President Bashar al‑Assad. They hacked into various Twitter accounts of the main news organizations from 2011 to 2013. Their victims...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Once again, Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has gain media attention by compromising a number of popular web hosting brands of one of the leading web-hosting companies Endurance International Group INC that manages over 60 different hosting brands. SEA, a pro-hacker group supposed to be aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is famous for hacking high-profile websites and targeting leading organisation with its advanced phishing attacks. This time the group hacked Endurance Group wings, including Bluehost, Justhost, Hostgator, Hostmonster and FastDomain, which are some of the world's leading web hosting companies. The official Twitter account linked to SEA group claimed responsibility for the hack. The group has posted the screenshots of the hacked panels of all the respective web hosting companies. REASON BEHIND HACK According to SEA group, Endurance Group's BlueHost, JustHost, HostGator and HostMonster were hosting terrorists web sites on their se...

Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) , a pro-hacker group supposed to be aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has again gain media attention by compromising a number of popular news websites and displayed a Thanksgiving popups informing people that they've been hacked. The Forbes, The Independent, The Chicago Tribune , The Daily Telegraph , The London Evening Standard, broadcaster CNBC, PC World and the US National Hockey League were among those popular websites affected by the group. This time they apparently targeted a third-party widget that is used by all those compromised websites. It is being reported that the hacker group found a way into registrar GoDaddy to compromise DNS records for the Gigya , a customer identity management platform used by all the sites. Although all site visitors were not affected by the attack, but some visitors using a line of Javascript were redirected to SEA web pages with the message " You've been hacked by the Syrian Elec...

Lots of Linux distributions are offered free of cost on the Internet by a number of companies, non-commercial organizations and by many individuals as well, and now, the notorious Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has announced their own Linux distribution known as SEANux . A Linux distribution is a coordinated collection of software consisting of a customized version of the kernel together with hundreds of open source (i.e., free) utilities, installers, programming languages and application programs. Some of the most popular distributions are Fedora (formerly Red Hat), SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Tails OS and Mint Linux. SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) is the same group of hackers who made the headlines in past year by launching advance phishing attacks against media organisations, usually Western media outlets. The group is reportedly aligned with president Bashar al-Assad and had purposely targeted social media accounts of a number of high-profile media outlets inclu...

Till now we all were aware about the truth that tech companies gave legal access to user data on the government's request, but we were unaware that well known tech companies also charge the government for providing data. Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) , the pro-hacker group, who had compromised Microsoft's Twitter account and blog, earlier this year and Microsoft did announce a breach on its blog earlier this year. " It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen ,". It seems that they have achieved something bigger than we expected by once more targeting Microsoft. This time the SEA hacking group has managed to successfully get into the FBI's super-secret Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), where they found the actual invoices from Microsoft; detailing how much each request for data cost, which means that the company charges for every document they provide to the FBI agents, Daily Dot reported. The invoic...

The Pro-hacker group, very well known as Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) aligned with president Bashar al-Assad, had recently taken down Forbes Website, sending a reminder to the international community that cyber warfare is alive and well, and this time the group has targeted U.S Central Command (CENTCOM) . Just a few minutes ago the SEA group has uploaded a screenshot and claims that they have compromised central repository of CENTCOM. From the screenshot, it appears that the group has hacked into the repository of Army Knowledge Online (AKO) , which   provides web-based enterprise information services to the United States Army, joint, and Department of Defense customers. " This is part of an on-going operation and we have already successfully penetrated many central repositories. #SEA " Hacking Group tweeted. The Group has  threatened to expose hundreds of secret documents that the group has obtained from the recent hack. "In the coming days we will updat...

Forbes  is the latest victim in a long line of high-profile attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) , sending a reminder to the international community that cyber warfare is alive and well. The pro-Assad group also took responsibility for hacking multiple Forbes websites and hijacked three Twitter accounts related to the website. According to the screenshots published by the team, it appears the hackers gained the access to the Wordpress administration panel of Forbes website and  edited several articles posted earlier on Forbes by authors Travis Bradberry, Matthew Herper, Andy Greenberg, John Dobosz, Steve Forbes  and titled then as " Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army ". Hackers tweeted, " Syrian Electronic Army was here " from the compromised Twitter accounts, including accounts of Social media editor Alex Knapp @TheAlexKnapp and Personal finance report Samantha Sharf  @Samsharf , and @ForbesTech account. The  Syrian Electronic Arm...

On the 10th Anniversary of Social networking website Facebook, the hacker group ' Syrian Electronic Army ' claimed that they managed to hack into the administrator account of the Facebook's Domain Registrar - MarkMonitor. The hacking group changed the Facebook Domain's contact information to a Syrian email address on the company's WHOIS domain information page, as shown. " Happy Birthday Mark! https://Facebook.com owned by #SEA " the group tweeted . Hackers also claimed that it had updated the nameserver information to hijack domain, but the process had to be abandoned because it was " taking too much time... " whereas, Facebook spokesperson did confirm that the website's domain record email contact information had been changed. Why SEA Targeted Facebook? Syrian activists and Hackers claimed that Facebook has been deleting pages created by dissidents and removing content as it was violating the social network's standards, acc...

A pro-hacker group, aligned with president Bashar al-Assad, very well known as Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has again gained the media attention by adding the popular sites, i.e. eBay UK and PayPal UK to its victim list. After targeting websites of various media agencies, government organizations and big enterprises, including the latest defaced CNN and Microsoft, today they targeted and defaced the official websites of UK's Ebay ( ebay.co.uk ) and PayPal ( paypal.co.uk ). The group also left a deface page along with a message on the hacked PayPal UK site: " Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army! Fuck the United States Government. " It is clear that the attack on PayPal could put millions of peoples' bank information at risk, but the group said that the attack is not to target account information of people instead was ' Purely a Hacktivist Operation ' with the reason behind is the discrimination of Syrian citizens by PayPal company. " For denying Syrian citizens ...

A well-known pro-Syrian hacker group known as Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) , aligned with President Bashar al- Assad, who successfully attacked The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Twitter, BBC, National Public Radio, Al-Jazeera, Microsoft, Xbox, Skype and responsible for cyber-attacks against various other U.S media companies in the past. Last evening, the Group claimed the responsibility for hacking another big media outlet " CNN ", compromised their Twitter, Facebook account and the website. CNN's twitter profile with 11.6 million followers saw a number of fake tweets from hackers, including allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is behind the Al-Qaida network. Hackers Tweeted, " Tonight, the #SEA decided to retaliate against #CNN's viciously lying reporting aimed at prolonging the suffering in #Syria. "   Following fake tweets were posted: " Syrian Electronic Army Was Here … Stop lying … All your reports are fake! "  " Obama Bin Laden...

Yesterday Night Microsoft has faced another targeted attack by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group supposed to be aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad . The SEA group is popular for its advance phishing attack and using the same technique they also hacked into the Official Twitter account of Microsoft News, Xbox Support, Skype and also defaced the Microsoft, Skype Official Blog pages in the past few weeks. Yesterday, Just after the Microsoft uploaded the newly designed website of it ' Microsoft Office ' blog, the Syrian Electronic Army gang again compromised it successfully. SEA uploaded the hacked blog screenshots on their twitter account, with a defacement article titled " Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army ", as shown. Before, they also taunted Microsoft that " changing the CMS will not help you if your employees are hacked and they don't know about that ." The Group kept their promise to continue their attacks...

Oops.. Hackers got Hacked! The Syrian Electronic Army , who has hacked hundreds of High Profile targets in 2013-14, today they got hacked by a Turkish hacker. Turkguvenligi , a Turkish hacker told The Hacker News that he hacked and defaced the official website of the hacking group SEA ( sea . sy  and  leaks . sea . sy ). SEA Group has taken down many serious targets like Microsoft, Obama & New York Times' twitter accounts & websites in the past, but today their own server got breached. The most common hacking technique used by the SEA Group is Phishing , but the Turkguvenligi hacked then using an exploit known for vulnerabilities in the server or website. At the time of writing this news, the whole website of SEA was down, but our readers can see the defacement mirror on Zone-H . Turkguvenligi tagged SEA in a  tweet , says " hi guys, you have been hacked ": The Syrian Electronic Army group has not commented anything about the hack, b...

It could be the worst day ever for Microsoft's patch management and Incident response team. A group of pro-Syrian  hackers ' Syrian Electronic Army ' has successfully compromised the official Twitter account of the Microsoft News ( @MSFTNews ), Xbox Support. They also defaced the Microsoft's TechNet blog ( blogs.technet.com ), and posted deface not over the blog. Microsoft says the situation is under control and no customer data was compromised. It seems that hackers have more internal access to the mailer system of the Microsoft, as they shared a screenshots of the internal communications between Microsoft's Public relations team and Steve Clayton, who is the manager in charge of Microsoft's corporate media platforms.  Last week, the SEA hacked Skype's blog and official twitter page, to spread the information about the NSA spying i.e. " Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying! " and today we have seen similar tweets from the Microsoft's N...

Happy 2014.. We are back with first hacking story of the year - SKYPE " Stop Spying " . Yes Skype Got hacked last night by an infamous hacker group called the Syrian Electronic Army , a group that supports Syria's president and typically they publish pro-Syrian government messages, but its first time they are taking about PRIVACY . Syrian Hackers posted some messages on Skype's Twitter account i.e. " Stop Spying on People! via Syrian Electronic Army ," Next tweet reads, " Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling it to the governments. " Syrian Electronic Army hackers also compromised Skype's Facebook page and a company blog hosted on Skype's website. A blog post published on the official Skype blog featured the headline, " Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying! ", which now has been deleted by Microsoft. Now it appeared that Skype regained the access to their accounts and dele...

As the year draws to a close, we have seen the number of emerging threats like advance phishing attacks from the Syrian Electronic Army , financial malware and exploit kits, Cryptolocker ransomware infections, massive  Bitcoin theft, extensive privacy breach from NSA and many more. The financial malware's were the most popular threat this year. Money is always a perfect motivation for attackers and cyber criminals who are continually targeting financial institutions. On Tuesday, Antivirus firm Symantec has released a Threat report, called " The State of Financial Trojans: 2013 ", which revealed that over 1,400 financial institutions have been targeted and compromised millions of computers around the globe and the most targeted banks are in the US with 71.5% of all analyzed Trojans. Financial institutions have been fighting against malware for the last ten years to protect their customers and online transactions from threat. Over the time the attackers adapted to these counter...

Just now, The hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) briefly took over the Twitter account of the TIME Magazine. The Hacker group  tweeted from the TIME's official account, " Syrian Electronic Army Was Here via  @Official_SEA16..Next time write a better word about the Syrian president #SEA " with their logo, as shown above. TIME Magazine is currently hosting polls for Who Should Be TIME's Person of the Year?  and on their website  the Syrian President  Bashar al-Assad is described as, " Syria's ruler presided over a bloody year, shrugging off international concerns over the use of chemical weapons as the death toll of his country's civil war eclipsed 100,000. " How they have hacked into TIME's account is not yet clear, but the group is famous for using advanced phishing attacks to conduct high profile hacks. The TIME's tweet was deleted by TIME's staff just after 10 minutes of the hack. In a separate tweet on their ...

The pro-Assad group Syrian Electronic Army claims it has hacked the President Barack Obama's website , Twitter-Facebook accounts and access email accounts linked to Organizing For Action, the non-profit offshoot of Obama For America, Obama's 2012 campaign operation. Last night,  Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)  hacked into Obama's donation website donate.barackobama.com , which was temporarily redirected to the website of the hacking group ( sea . sy / indexs / ) with a short message: " Hacked by SEA ". The hackers were able to take over only a secondary donations page. It was an older page - still on the site, but was no longer being used. They have also posted fake tweets and updates from Obama's Facebook Page and Twitter accounts, " All  the  links that Barack Obama account tweeted it and post it on Facebook was redirected to a video showing the truth about Syria " Hacker told Mashable in an interview. The attackers also compromised the URL ...

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is at it again. The hacktivist group, who are known to back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad , has hacked many high profile Qatar based websites, including the Google, Facebook, Aljazeera and Government - Military websites. Starting at about 4:25 am (GMT 5:30+), the Syrian Electronic Army shared this message on Twitter: Qatar is #down and  following that, they went about switching off government and private websites using the .qa extension. The domains are managed by Qatar's Ministry of Information and Communication (ictQatar). Apparently, the Syrian Electronic Army gained access to  Qatar Domain Registrar ( portal.registry.qa ) and modifies the DNS entires to redirects the targeted websites to servers controlled by hackers serving defacement page, that include a picture of Assad and the groups logo, as shown. The List of the targeted websites is posted on Twitter by hackers - these include: moi . gov .qa facebook .qa gov ....