Syrian Electronic Army Hacked into ShareThis.com's GoDaddy Account

A Syrian-based hacktavist group who calls themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, responsible for breaching large media websites mostly based in the United States, has claimed many victims with the latest being ShareThis.com through accessing their GoDaddy account.

The brazen cyberhackers from the Syrian Electronic Army are a group of hackers who appear to support the Assad regime, which may be a direct correlation to the recent up-rise in Syria threatening to fuel potential fallout involving the United States and other countries.

The Syrian Electronic Army hacker group, for obvious reasons, has been on the radar screen of security researchers as of late as they continue to target large sites. So far, most of the attacked sites belong to media organizations around the world, primarily in the United States.

In the latest breach, the Syrian Electronic Army was able to gain access to a GoDaddy account belonging to ShareThis.com. With access to the GoDaddy account, they were able to change the nameserver settings, which would point the site to whatever the hackers choose. It just so happens that the hackers decided to redirect users visiting ShareThis.com directly to the Syrian Electronic Army's very own home page.

The popular file sharing platform, ShareThis.com, has to inform their customers that they were 'experiencing technical difficulties'. ShareThis.com decided at the time not to mention any word of the breach publicly.

The Syrian Electronic Army has long been known to specifically target media outlets on the internet but have recently changed gears to seek out third party entities, such as SocialFlow and Outbrain, which are ironically used by media organizations. The Syrian Electronic Army has set their sights on other large news entities with the most recent reports have claimed them to be responsible for taking down the New York Times site through hacking related registry accounts.

As many media sites have a major dilemma on their hands for security, it may be the 3rd party entities and source generators that they utilize on a daily basis making them vulnerable to the recent attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army. As the fallout in the Syrian region takes place, we suspect other attacks to come out of the Syrian Electronic Army where many other US-based sites could succumb to hacks.