Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) seems ceaselessly adamant on hacking on Western media organization after another. After its recent attacks at Microsoft and Skype, the hacktivist group recently broke into Forbes‘ site and made away with user data.
The group has been frequently in tech headlines, given its high-profile breaches of the tech and media industry in the recent past. SEA proclaims allegiance to Syria’s Bashar-ul-Assad and claims that its hacks are meant to dispel propaganda against Assad.
The group was apparently able to access the backend WordPress publishing platform of the site. SEA claims that as a result of the breach, it has been able to get its hands on the usernames and passwords of nearly a million users. The group has reportedly published this data online.
Meanwhile, Forbes has confirmed the breach. An official statement from Forbes reads, “Forbes.com’s publishing platform was compromised. We’ve been making adjustments to the site to protect online privacy and the editorial integrity of our content. We are looking into and monitoring the situation closely. We’re taking this matter very seriously.”
The company has revealed further details in a Facebook post, “Forbes.com was targeted in a digital attack and our publishing platform was compromised. Users’ email addresses may have been exposed. The passwords were encrypted, but as a precaution, we strongly encourage Forbes readers and contributors to change their passwords on our system, and encourage them to change them on other websites if they use the same password elsewhere. We have notified law enforcement. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to the members of our community for this breach.”
For now, Forbes has disabled access of outside contributors to its WordPress dashboard. SEA has been boasting about the attack on its Twitter feed and ‘thanked’ Alex Knapp, the social media editor of Forbes, for the breach. Apparently, @ForbesTech and @TheAlexKnapp Twitter accounts were also breached by the group as part of the hack.
Source: Recode/SEA Twitter
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