http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/technology/financial-times-site-is-hacked.html
By NICOLE PERLROTH
The New York Times
May 17, 2013
It’s the question of the moment inside the murky realm of cybersecurity: Just
who -- or what -- is the Syrian Electronic Army?
The hacking group that calls itself the S.E.A. struck again on Friday, this
time breaking into the Twitter accounts and blog headlines of The Financial
Times. The attack was part of a crusade that has targeted dozens of media
outlets as varied as The Associated Press and The Onion, the parody news site.
But just who is behind the S.E.A.’s cybervandalism remains a mystery.
Paralleling the group’s boisterous, pro-Syrian government activity has been a
much quieter Internet surveillance campaign aimed at revealing the identities,
activities and whereabouts of the Syrian rebels fighting the government of
President Bashar al-Assad.
Now sleuths are trying to figure out how much overlap there is between the
rowdy pranks playing out on Twitter and the silent spying that also
increasingly includes the monitoring of foreign aid workers. It’s a high-stakes
search. If researchers prove the Assad regime is closely tied to the group,
foreign governments may choose to respond because the attacks have real-world
consequences. The S.E.A. nearly crashed the stock market, for example, by
planting false tales of White House explosions in a recent hijacking of The
A.P.’s Twitter feed.
The mystery is made more curious by the belief among researchers that the
hackers currently parading as the S.E.A. are not the same people who started
the pro-Assad campaign two years ago.
[...]
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