On Thanksgiving Day , the Syrian Electronic Army group managed to place pop-ups advertising itself on a number of websites, including major corporations such as NBC, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, NHL, The Telegraph, The Independent and others, and the group has now claimed responsibility for the hit, although the reasons remain unclear.
The attack was not immediately successful and the group was unable to access the sites where they posted their messages while using the Gigya platform , which is a service used to display and manage comments. The hackers exploited GoDaddy to change Gigya 's DNS and then post the messages.
A Twitter from an account associated with the Syrian Electronic Army states that the group never intended to steal or destroy data and suggests that NoScript was a good way to ensure that the same attack would not be achieved if another group sought to do so.
The creators of Gigya announced that they have patched the vulnerability used in the Thanksgiving Day.
It is unclear whether the Syrian Electronic Army plans to focus solely on publicity stunts in the near future, furthering Al-Assad's agenda, or whether the group will also attempt to gain access to personal data and use it for its own purposes.
The country's current government, led by Bashar al-Assad, shows tolerance for this particular hacker group and tends to mainly target opposition groups, Western human rights organizations and the media.
The group has been active since the start of the Syrian Civil War and arguably its highest success was in April 2013, when it managed to gain access to the Twitter account of the news agency “ Associated Press ” and spread information that the White House had been bombed and that US President Barack Obama had been injured, resulting in a stock market crash.
