On Saturday morning, the Microsoft News Twitter account offered a curious
instruction.
It read:
"Don't use Microsoft emails(hotmail,outlook),
They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments. #SEA @Official_SEA16."
As to the perpetrators, the "SEA" hashtag points to the Syrian Electronic Army, a
hacking group sympathetic to President Bashar Assad.
The SEA has operated for some time now, hacking its way into places such as a BBC
Twitter account. Indeed, this is the second time this year
that the SEA has targeted Microsoft. On New Year's Day, it attacked Skype's Twitter and
Facebook accounts with the same wording as today.
A follow-up tweet Saturday, also issued through the Microsoft News Twitter account, showed an image of the Syrian flag with the
message:
"Syrian Electronic Army Was Here via @Official_SEA16 #SEA."
A Microsoft spokesperson
offered this statement:
"Microsoft is aware of
targeted cyberattacks that temporarily affected the Xbox Support and Microsoft
News Twitter accounts. The accounts were quickly reset and we can confirm that no
customer information was compromised."
No comments:
Post a Comment