Hunting for Syrian Hackers' Chain of Command

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

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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