New Cyber Attack on U.S. Media Sites

By: Zain Nabi  |   August 17th, 2013   |   News

The new target of hackers is now the media sites of the U.S. including CNN, Times and the Washington Post. These hackers hack the sites by breaching Outbrain of the websites. As the customers logged on to these websites and clicked the content from Outbrain, a headline appeared that said, “Hacked by SEA”.

 

The hackers this way are promoting the Syrian Electronic Army system. The Syrian Electronic Army is an online group of some hackers that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and is associated with a number of high profile attacks on some of the major sites.

 

Recently this group of hackers has targeted some of the major sites. They published the important content of these websites on multiple platforms by breaching a single supplier. Previously, these hackers by using the similar tactics breached entire networks. But in those cases they did not publish the content on different platforms but instead sent emails to the employees of the company whose websites were being targeted.

 

Outbrain Vice President Lisa LaCour said, via Reuters, “Outbrain, which posts content on a large number of prominent news sites, took down its entire network at about 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, before the hackers could do any more damage. The company’s technicians, who is based in Israel, cleaned up the network and planned to restore service late on Thursday”.

 

The hackers after sending an email to all the employees of the company and also to CEOs get into the websites. As soon as the employees provide their login credential to the computer the hackers access them and hack the entire content of the company, said the Outbrain Company.

 

Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer for software security firm Veracode, said the hackers will increasingly choose to go after third-party providers because their security is likely to be more lax than that of their customers.

 

Image: Vosizneias