The prolific SEA[1] has been responsible for many hacks when their aim went wider than tracking domestic dissidents via internet monitoring with hardware from BlueCoat[2]. Logs[3] leaked by dissident supporting Telecomix[4] from this BlueCoat hardware for example show filters set to monitor the religious and sexual habits of all traffic routed through the datacenter they were installed in.
After Assad deployed his military forces SEA started to become a more public facing entity, taking on media firms due to perceived slights in reporting and others to cull more user information to further track targets. A short time-line from Wikipedia:
April 2013: The SEA hijacked the Associated Press Twitter account and falsely claimed the White House had been bombed and President Barack Obama injured.
May 2013: The ITV news London Twitter account was hacked on the 24th May 2013 by the SEA. The Android applications of British Broadcaster Sky News were also hacked on 26 May 2013 on Google Play Store.
July 2013, Truecaller servers were allegedly hacked into by the Syrian Electronic Army.
August 2013: Advertising service Outbrain was hacked by the SEA via a spearphishing attack. This allowed them to place redirects into the websites of The Washington Post, Time, and CNN.
Their history has been starkly pro-Assad, even going as far to defend indiscriminate bombing runs on the more rural cities in Syria of which the hackers are not likely to live in. While villages far away from the loyalist strongholds of Mezzeh 86 or al-Assad housing are more easily cast off of 'nests of terrorists' to be 'cleansed' it has to be harder to rationalize the same when the bombing runs are striking neighborhoods within visible range of these loyalist strongholds.
A SEA affiliated twitter account became highly critical after a chemical weapons attack on the outside suburbs of Damascus, the user posted a video of the event along with the message:
"We are calling for all members of SEA to focus their attentions on the political elite that is the scourge of our country."
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 9.3 ms ] threadAfter Assad deployed his military forces SEA started to become a more public facing entity, taking on media firms due to perceived slights in reporting and others to cull more user information to further track targets. A short time-line from Wikipedia:
April 2013: The SEA hijacked the Associated Press Twitter account and falsely claimed the White House had been bombed and President Barack Obama injured.
May 2013: The ITV news London Twitter account was hacked on the 24th May 2013 by the SEA. The Android applications of British Broadcaster Sky News were also hacked on 26 May 2013 on Google Play Store.
July 2013, Truecaller servers were allegedly hacked into by the Syrian Electronic Army.
August 2013: Advertising service Outbrain was hacked by the SEA via a spearphishing attack. This allowed them to place redirects into the websites of The Washington Post, Time, and CNN.
Their history has been starkly pro-Assad, even going as far to defend indiscriminate bombing runs on the more rural cities in Syria of which the hackers are not likely to live in. While villages far away from the loyalist strongholds of Mezzeh 86 or al-Assad housing are more easily cast off of 'nests of terrorists' to be 'cleansed' it has to be harder to rationalize the same when the bombing runs are striking neighborhoods within visible range of these loyalist strongholds.
A SEA affiliated twitter account became highly critical after a chemical weapons attack on the outside suburbs of Damascus, the user posted a video of the event along with the message:
"We are calling for all members of SEA to focus their attentions on the political elite that is the scourge of our country."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Electronic_Army
[2] http://www.bluecoat.com/
[3] http://bluesmote.com/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecomix