Syrian computer hacker conglomerate, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), has kicked off the New Year with a number of cyber-attacks, compromising Skype’s Twitter, Facebook accounts, and its official blog.
Social media accounts belonging to Skype, Microsoft’s voice-over-IP service, were hacked around 19:30 GMT. SEA posted on Skype’s Twitter account a rogue message saying “Stop spying on people! via Syrian Electronic Army.” The hacker group also urged people not to use Microsoft accounts because the company is “selling the data to the governments.”
Since SEA’s inception in 2011, the organization has denied any association with the Syrian government. They claim to be self-motivated patriotic supporters of the government, but are not acting on its behalf.
In 2013, SEA claimed responsibility for hacking a number of Western media outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Thomson Reuters. Arguably, their biggest success was the penetration of the Associated Press twitter account that posted President Barack Obama had been injured in a White House attack.
Skype has now fully regained control and deleted the false tweets from the compromised social media channels. Its blog is being automatically redirected to Skype’s homepage.
“We recently became aware of a targeted cyber-attack that led to access to Skype’s social media properties, but these credentials were quickly reset. No user information was compromised,” a Skype spokesman responded to TheNextWeb query.