The Syrian Electronic Army launched a cyber attack on Thursday against various western websites including the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, New York Daily News and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, according to Reuters.
Users were not able to access the websites and instead received a pop-up message which stated, "You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)." The site visitors were then redirected to the group's own servers.
The hackers were able to launch the attack by exploiting the domain name system (DNS) of Gigya, an online platform that manages and tracks the number of visitors to a business's websites, CNET reported.
Gigya's clients include media websites that were victimized by SEA during the cyber attack.
Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer detailed the attack through a post on the company's blog.
"At approximately 6:45 AM EST we identified sporadic failures with access to our service. An initial inquiry has revealed that there was a breach at our domain registrar that resulted in the WHOIS record of gigya.com being modified to point to a different DNS server," the executive wrote.
"That DNS server had been configured to point Gigya's CDN (content delivery network) domain (cdn.gigya.com) to a server controlled by the hackers, where they served a file called 'socialize.js' with an alert claiming that the site had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army," Salyer added.
Salyer assured that confidential information about their users and clients were not compromised during the attack. He also noted that the company has enforced precautionary methods to prevent future hacks.
"Gigya has the highest levels of security around our service and user data," he wrote. "We have put additional measures in place to protect against this type of attack in the future."
The Syrian Electronic Army is composed of a group of hackers supported and funded by President Bashar al-Assad's government, according to the Guardian. The group first surfaced in 2011 after the events of the civil war in Syria. The group is known for targeting western-based media news sites.
