Syrian Electronic Army ‘Hack’ Affects Boston.Com, Dozens of Other Sites
A number of websites — including Boston.com — were affected by a hack of a third-party service provider Thanksgiving morning.
The hack, which launched a pop-up message for some users reading “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army(SEA),’’ then redirects to an image of the group’s logo. The hacker collective has [fragment number=0] Update: The group has since taken responsibility with a message on its Twitter page.
Hackers were able to carry out the breach by gaining access to Gigya’s domain registrar, according to a statement provided by the company. Boston.com has since temporarily suspended the platform on our site until the problems are resolved.
“At approximately 6:45 AM EST we identified an issue with our domain registrar,’’ the service bulletin reads. “An initial inquiry has revealed that there was a breach at our domain registrar that resulted in the redirect of the gigya.com domain for a subset of users. The issue has been addressed and is currently propagating through DNS.’’
In English? Hackers were able to take control of the gigya.com domain name and alter its settings to direct users to another website. The company emphasized that no user data had been compromised.
Many were affected by the wide-ranging hack, including sites maintained by media outlets, international corporations and non-profit organizations. Journalist Andrew Peng has a list of those affected on his Twitter timeline.
One Boston.com reader shared these screenshots of what she saw on her iPhone:
[fragment number=1]
The Syrian Electronic Army is a state-sponsored hacker collective politically aligned with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad who have carried similar hacks in the past. Earlier this year, the group hijacked the Twitter account of the Israeli Army and also targeted Harvard University’s website in 2011.
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