Ebay and PayPal hacked

The group of hackers Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has monopolized the attention of the media, the hacking team has practically hit every possible target within government organizations, big enterprises and media agencies. The list of victims is very crowded, last in order of time were CNN and Microsoft.

Today hackers of Syrian Electronic Army hacked PayPal and Ebay, the group modified the DNS records of ebay.co.uk and paypal.co.uk defacing their websites. SEA was able to hack into The Domain Registry of Paypal and Ebay which is Managed by Mark Monitor.

The hackers have condemned the decision of the PayPal company to discriminate Syrian citizens:

 

 

The attack hasn’t caused any data breach, the hackers haven’t targeted specific PayPal profiles, but they limited their offensive to a demonstrative act to protest against the PayPal company.
The screenshot posted in the tweet revealed that the hackers accessed the Admin panel to edit the DNS information of the targeted websites.

According first information available on the attack, the Syrian Electronic Army has compromised the Mark Monitor account of Ebay and hacked the email account belonging to Paul Whitted, Sr. Manager, Site Engineering Center at eBay and posted screenshot of the internal communications.
It is still not clear how the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the account, at the time of writing this post both websites were restored to normal.

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Cyber attacks: Nigeria could be a key target this year

Nigeria’s government as well as the country’s financial and ICT sectors will be under increasing threat of cyber attacks this year, claims a technology expert.

In a report by The Daily Trust Tim Akano, Managing Director and CEO of New Horizons Nigeria is quoted as saying that people and institutions could fall victim to attacks from a number of threats including malware, ransomware, spear phising and social network attacks, amongst others.

He also issued the warning that because of the growth of mobile, there is expected to be an increase in mobile malware.

“Smart phones and tablet vulnerabilities will be exploited by hackers to steal information and data for commercial gains and blackmail. When the ransomware pops up while browsing on the internet disguised as a genuine message from the law enforcement agents claiming that the computer user is into something unethical and illegal on the net, the device will then be locked automatically and a message requesting the owner to pay certain sum of cash into a code to get the device unlocked will be sent,” the publication quotes Akano as saying.

Akano also highlighted the danger of what he described as “advanced, persistent threats” by hackers and the use of social networks as a base from which to initiate attacks.

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