Syrian Hackers Infiltrate Business Site, Affecting Other Websites
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Version 0 of 1. LOS ANGELES — Gigya, an American company that helps connect more than 700 businesses with customers through social media, says a Syrian group hacked its web address to upload a message to other sites. Gigya’s chief executive, Patrick Salyer, outlined what happened in a blog post published on Thursday. At around 6:45 a.m. Eastern time, the company discovered “sporadic failures with access to our service,” he wrote. Mr. Salyer said hackers had rerouted Internet traffic from Gigya’s website to an outside computer server. That server generated a message to visitors that the site had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. Published reports noted the message appeared on websites for several British newspapers, CNBC and the National Hockey League. The message also showed up briefly on some retail sites just as they prepared for the biggest shopping day of the year on Friday. The National Retail Federation did not immediately comment on Thursday. Still, the issue appeared to be resolved quickly. The hackers rerouted Gigya’s web traffic by modifying the company’s web address on the Internet registry Whois.com so that it would point visitors to the outside server. The registry entry on Whois.com was fixed about an hour after the company detected the breach, Mr. Salyer said. Even so, Mr. Salyer sought to reassure the company’s clients. ”To be absolutely clear: Neither Gigya’s platform itself nor any user, administrator or operational data has been compromised and was never at risk of being compromised,” he wrote. The Syrian Electronic Army aligns itself with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. It has previously taken responsibility for hacking media sites like E! Online and the BBC. |