Syrian Electronic Army hijacks Microsoft blog and Twitter account
Sean Hollister
Pro-Assad hacking group apparently commandeers the financial information firm's Twitter account, sending out illustrations backing the Syrian president.
On New Year's Day, the Syrian Electronic Army
hacked Skype's Twitter account and its official Microsoft blog
, allegedly in order to warn people away from Microsoft's email services. Today, the hackers appear to be at it again. This morning, they broke into the Microsoft News Twitter account, and now they've hijacked the entire Official Microsoft Blog, turning it into a giant automatic redirect to their own
propaganda website.
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On New Year's Day, when many Microsoft support employees were likely on vacation, the breaches weren't addressed immediately, but today Microsoft appears to be actively combating the threat. Today's first tweet was rapidly deleted, as were postings to the Official Microsoft Blog.
However, the browser hijack is still in place as of this writing and it appears that the Syrian Electronic Army may have even deeper access than that. The group is posting screenshots to Twitter of what appear to be internal communications between Microsoft's public relations team and Steve Clayton, the manager in charge of Microsoft's corporate media platforms.
We've reached out to Microsoft asking the company to detail the extent of the cyberattacks, and we'll let you know what we hear.
Update 8:31PM ET: Microsoft's official blogs are now down. "The site is currently undergoing maintenance and will be down till 9:30 PM PST on January 11th 2014," reads a message.
Update: 9:02PM ET: When asked, a Syrian Electronic Army representative says that today's attack was designed to be a distraction. "We are making some distraction for Microsoft employees so we can success in our main mission," they told The Verge by email.
Update 3: Microsoft's official blog has been restored.