On February 15th, the Syrian Electronic Army, hacked the server of Forbes, which was located in the United Kingdom.
The SEA’s Twitter account which was restored recently, after being temporarily suspended in the aftermath of the PayPal & eBay hack, tweeted images which showed they had access to Forbes’ Wordpress Dashboard.
The SEA wrote a post under the Forbes editor Tom Post’s byline, with the headline reading “Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.” But it was quickly taken down by Forbes.
The Syrians didn’t stop there. They went on to tease Forbes, by offering to sell the account information of 1,071,963 Forbes users. They then published the entire table for free. The next day, the SEA announced that they had deleted the table containing the user information and asked Forbes users to change their passwords.
SEA said the reason behind the data breach was due to “Forbes being unethical”.
Forbes did not acknowledge the data breach, but did admit that their server had been compromised.
When contacted by Re/code, a Forbes spokesperson said,
"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."
Forbes is one of the few websites, to fall victim to the Syrian Electronic Army, who are credited with using email phishing techniques to gain access to servers. Earlier the SEA attacked Microsoft Services including the social networking accounts of Skype, Xbox Support, Microsoft News & TechNet Blog , Microsoft Employees’ Email accounts, and CNN’s social networking accounts.
via: Neowin