The Syrian Electronic Army attacked a number of news sites earlier this week, sending pop-ups out to those who attempted to visit Forbes, The Telegraph, The Independant, Time Out, PC World and The Evening Standard. The hacking group managed to gain access through a DNS that redirects through Gigya, a customer identity management platform used by all of the sites affected.

The javascript popup appeared across the websites, showing visitors the message “You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)”. The Telegraph was the first to admit that its site had been compromised and put the blame on a third-party, which we now know to be Gigya.

Gigya later gave its own statement, admitting to the hack and confirming that it has taken steps to patch things up:

“Some calls to Gigya domains were redirected to the hackers site or showed a hacking message to end users. It might take some time until the changes propagate to all users. We have worked with GoDaddy to resolve the issue and the redirection was removed.”

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KitGuru Says: It is currently not known why the SEA chose to hack these news sites but the issue seems to have been resolved. Apparently no user data was affected during the breach.

Source: The Register

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