On Thursday the Syrian Electronic Army hacked th he websites of British and North American media organizations and retailer Wal-Mart's Canadian unit, including the New York Times, CBC and the Telegraph. Visitors saw this pop-up message: “you’ve been hacked by SEA.”The news organizations hit were in the UK and the US. US sites hit included the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, CNBC, CBC and Forbes.
Users try to access certain parts of the attacked websites found a message that read "You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)" and were then redirected to the group's logo, an image of an eagle bearing the Syrian flag and a message in Arabic.
The group posted on its Twitter feed, referring to Thursday's U.S. Thanksgiving holiday: "Happy thanks giving, hope you didn't miss us! The press: Please don't pretend #ISIS are civilians. #SEA"
A Twitter account affiliated with the Syrian group posted an image on Thursday that appeared to show it accessed the GoDaddy account of gigya.com, a company that helps businesses identify those who visit their websites.
Gigya counts the NFL, NBA and NHL professional sports leagues, and media outlets including the CBC, CBS, NBC, Forbes, CNN, al Jazeera and Fox among its customers. It was not immediately clear how many of them were affected.
Gigya said a breach at its domain registrar, GoDaddy, resulted in traffic to its site being redirected, but that the problem had since been fixed.
GoDaddy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
"To be absolutely clear: Neither Gigya’s platform itself nor any user, administrator or operational data has been compromised and was never at risk of being compromised," Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer said in a blog post.
