Syrian Electronic Army Outbrain Hack Affects Washington Post, CNN

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has claimed responsibility for hacking the link referral service Outbrain used by The Washington Post and CNN.

Both national outlets were indirectly affected by the intrusion on Thursday.

The Washington Post reported being hacked, but that is not exactly accurate. Outbrain, which the newspaper publication uses for link referral is the one who was hacked, and this situation affected Post visitors.

Boasting about the attack, the SEA provided screenshots of its workings to E Hacking News, which showed that it was Outbrain who was actually hacked.

Outbrain provides many mainstream news outlets with a content referral widget that gives readers links to related stories. On CNN and The Washington Post sites, some of those links were affected by the SEA hack.

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Washington Post managing editor said in a statement that several days ago employees at the newspaper were subjected to a sophisticated phishing attack, which allegedly came from the SEA. This time however it is more of Outbrain’s issue.

“This morning, some articles on our web site were re-directed to the Syrian Electronic Army’s site for a period of about 30 minutes,” Garcia-Ruiz said. “The Syrian Electronic Army, in a Tweet, claimed they gained access to elements of our site by hacking one of our business partners, Outbrain. We have taken defensive measures and removed the offending module. At this time, we believe there are no other issues affecting the site.”

In the past, the SEA has managed to hack into several media outlet sites and Twitter accounts. On Tuesday, they were reportedly successful in hacking the New York Post Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The leader of the SEA said in an interview with the Daily Beast on Wednesday, the attacks were in response to Twitter shutting down the organizations accounts.

On Wednesday, The New York Times site was down for over an hour, but the newspaper claimed it was due to an outage, not a hack.

At the time this article was written, Outbrain site was still down. The company said on Twitter they’re working on the issue of trying to secure their site and bring it up “shortly.”

Due to an attack, our recommendations are down. Our team is working to get our system secure & up shortly. Apologize for any inconvenience.

— Outbrain (@Outbrain) August 15, 2013

The Syrian Electronic Army is a supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

[Image via Shutterstock]