Pierluigi Paganini October 28, 2013

Syrian Electronic Army Targeted President Obama’s website, Twitter and Facebook accounts and email account linked to his non-profit activities.

Once again Syrian Electronic Army, the pro-Assad group claims it has hacked the President Barack Obama’s website, the social media accounts belonging to him on Twitter and Facebook and it violated the email accounts linked to a non-profit offshoot of Obama For America, Organizing For Action. The following image posted by SEA is the proof of the hack of the Obama Campaign email account

The attack started this night when the Syrian Electronic Army redirected donate.barackobama.com visitors to the website of the group of hacktivists (sea.sy/indexs/) that displayed an eloquent message:

At the time of writing, the donate.barackobama.com was restored and it no longer redirects users to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army.

Once again I remark that Syrian Electronic Army is a structured and fearsome hacking group pro the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that conducted numerous high profile attacks against media agencies, government organizations and private companies, the last campaign in order of time hit most Qatar websites.

The SEA mission is to defend the President from the attack of enemies especially based on disinformation campaign promoted by Western governments.

It was just the beginning because the Syrian Electronic Army has also taken over another donation page still present on the site and it has posted fake tweets and updates from Obama’s Facebook Page and Twitter accounts.

“All the links that Barack Obama account tweeted it and post it on Facebook was redirected to a video showing the truth about Syria” stated the group to Mashable.

At this moment the links posted on President social media accounts had not been fixed.

The group has published on twitter a message to its follower motivating the attack with following statement:

“Obama doesn’t have any ethical issues with spying on the world, so we took it upon ourself to return the favor. #SEA”

Well, despite the incident hasn’t had serious repercussion it is fundamental to highlight that similar incidents could cause serious problems, let’s remind the effect on stock market observed just after the SEA has hacked months ago the Twitter account of AP.

How is it possible that these guys succeeded so easily to hack official Presidential accounts? IMHO this is very serious, this time they hit a website, next time it could be the SCADA of a critical infrastructure, do not underestimate the incident.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – President Obama,SEA, cyber security)