President Obama’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were
briefly compromised this week – with two Tweets and one post altered to
send links to video montages of terrorist attacks.
Both Tweets were retweeted hundreds of times – with the attackers having broken into a Shortswitch account associated with the Twitter account to change the URLs, according to CNN.
The hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the attacks. An older campaign donation site, donate.barackobama.com was also briefly redirected to the hacker group’s own site – and carried a message, “Hacked by SEA”, according to a report by The Hacker News.
All the attacks targeted the Presidents Organizing for
Action campaign. An OFA spokesman said, “An account to our link
shortener was hacked.” The group gained access by hacking OFA staff
emails, according to a report by The Register, and boasted that “they didn’t even use two-step authentication.”
“All the links that Barack Obama account tweeted it and
post it on Facebook was redirected to a video showing the truth about
Syria,” a purported hacker said in an email interview with Mashable.
The group has previously targeted high-profile sites such
as The New York Times – often attacking supplier companies such as DNS
registrars, and using targeted spear-phishing attacks to carry out their
goals.
“The SEA went after the company specifically to create a
high-profile event,” Melbourne IT CEO Theo Hnarakis told Reuters, after
the group targeted the New York Times via his company’s email system.
“This was quite a sophisticated attack.”
The group has claimed responsibility for a series of high-profile hacks against media organizations and
messaging apps over the past few months, with hacks targeting the
Thomson Reuters, the Financial Times, CBS and chat apps such as Tango
and Viber.
In the wake of attacks earlier this year, Twitter sent out an email to media groups saying, “We believe that these attacks will continue, and that news and media organizations will continue to be high value targets to hackers.”
