Syrian Electronic Army: We Hacked Obama’s Twitter Account
They did not hack the actual account, but a Web service that shortens URLs:
A hacker group sympathetic to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad claimed responsibility Monday for an attack in which President Barack Obama’s official Twitter account linked to a war propaganda video.
The hackers targeted a link-shortening service used by the Obama account, which is administered by the former campaign group Organizing for Action.
The resulting Obama tweet appeared to link to a Washington Post story about immigration.
But the link briefly carried users to a half-hour-long YouTube video that opens with footage of the 9/11 attacks.
The Syrian Electronic Army claimed credit for the attack in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. “Obama doesn’t have any ethical issues with spying on the world, so we took it upon ourselves to return the favor,” the statement said.
The hacker group staged a major attack on the New York Times website at the end of August and hacked the Associated Press’s Twitter account in April.
