Reporter Fran Berkman at Mashable writes that an exclusive email was sent to their outlet from a purported email account associated with the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). In that email, the SEA, who are pro-Assad, claimed they hacked into Obama’s twitter and Facebook accounts.
According to Berkman, however, SEA didn’t gain total access to his social media accounts. They did “[alter] the links in the post by tampering with the URL shortener service for BarackObama.com.”
SEA has been a problem when it comes to tampering with the President’s social media sites in the past few months. They also hacked into The New York Times, a story we covered – with a slightly different angle – here in late August. (Twitter fell victim to SEA, too).
Mashable has covered other claims from the group with the same address, and in one email interview the SEA claimed, “We will target all of it,” if the United States attacks the country. That message came when President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were pushing for military action against the country after the Syrian government allegedly killed over 1,400 of its own civilians between August 18th and August 21st using chemical weapons.
On another related note, the Syrian government will take down the Internet when fighting or protests occur in the country that has been torn asunder by civil war. For instance, in late August of this year, Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria, lost access to the Internet just like that. The government will also take the Internet down when President Assad, who rarely makes public appearances, speaks at an event.
Infamous terrorist organizations have also taken to social media, but not necessarily to hack, like the SEA. For example, the Taliban and al-Shabaab (the al-Qaeda affiliate who were responsible for the horrific massacre of 21 people at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya) have sent out tweets after murdering people or plotting to take out officials. Twitter responds quickly and removes their handles and thus bans them from using the social media platform. However, that doesn’t stop them from cropping up again with similar tweets and pro-terrorist propaganda.
