Washington post, CNN and Time Magazine websites has been attacked

The famous European news portal Washington post, CNN and Time Magazine websites has been attacked by hackers. They has edited some links of the sites their friendly. 

They are working from Syria. They are supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and known as ‘Syrian electronic Army’. The virtual army has been targeted to opposite political group and western media. They did hack social accounts before. Now they went one step ahead, and edited the web page of world famous website to their friendly.


Attack to other's site is a not joke for beginner of computer programming but it might very easy for a experience programmer. If somebody have a good knowledge of Networking Data Transmission and low level programming mostly networking programming he can easily get data from Another port as well from FTP port [DATA SERVER]. while developing a web application, programmer does not get enough time to implements a strong security mechanism. There are many way to defend web site or web server. If web application has developed with well managed team and has allocated some budget to continue monitor a web server, it protects from those bad activities.

‘Syrian electronic army’ has took responsibility for the incident. The army tweet on tweeter and claimed that they gained access to those sites. The hackers group controlled their some articles for some hours.

The managing director of Washington Post, Mr Emilio Garcia-Ruiz wrote “A few days ago, The Syrian Electronic Army, allegedly, subjected Post newsroom employees to a sophisticated phishing attack to gain password information. “

He also added “The attack resulted in one staff writer’s personal Twitter account being used to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message. For 30 minutes this morning, some articles on our web site were redirected to the Syrian Electronic Army’s site. The Syrian Electronic Army, in a Tweet, claimed they gained access to elements of our site by hacking one of our business partners, Outbrain.”

“ We have taken defensive measures and removed the offending module. At this time, we believe there are no other issues affecting The Post site.” Emilio wrote.

CNN found out the problem and they made disable the  hacked plug-in recently. If they did not take action in time, They might had to face more problem.

The Time Magazine spokesman said that the website is not affected directly. So it should not say the website has been hacked. However he accepted that they have to apply more security features in future.

Technology development gives us so many good and bad things as well. there are both the part. if we use a technology in positive way, results positive. many people can take benifits from technology. it does not mean to use technology to damage other's property. if the world famous websites are not secure, what is the guarantee of our website.