News links on Washington Post, ‪Time‬ and ‎CNN‬ hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

Syrian Electronic Army attacked The Washington Post, CNN and Time by breaching a news recommendation engine that appears on those websites.

Hacked news links were redirecting to a site controlled by The Syrian Electronic Army.

The Syrian Electronic Army hacked recommendation service Outbrain, which is used by several prominent websites, including CNN, Time and the Washington Post. Outbrain took down its tool on Thursday, and the media companies disabled the service as a precautionary measure.

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, managing editor of the Post, said the affected links were only displayed on the site for about a half hour.

In a tweet , the Syrian Electronic Army said that it attacked the Post, CNN and Time “in one strike” by hacking Outbrain.

The Post said the Syrian Electronic Army launched a sophisticated phishing attack against one of its staff writers a few days ago. The SEA used the writer’s personal account to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message.

The SEA group has done this before.

On Tuesday, the pro-Syrian hacking group took credit for hacking the New York Post’sFacebook page and Twitter feeds of some of some Post reporters, in addition to hacking the social media sites and blog of social media content manager SocialFlow.

The website of the New York Times went down on Wednesday for a couple hours, prompting speculation hackers were responsible, but a spokeswoman for the paper said the outage was the result of complications associated with a scheduled maintenance update

Over the past few months, the group managed to hack the British broadcaster the BBC,The Financial Times, The Associated Press, CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) News and NPR, as well as Columbia University and Human Rights Watch.

SEA says that it defends Syria against the blatant media attacks launched by western and some Arab countries in order to destabilize Syria.
SEA says that it is from and for the people “defending their rights and also defending the clear vision of what really happens in Syria away from western fact-distortion.”