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Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site

#3

Is there a coincidence with the Times being down yesterday and this??

No, the Times episode was clearly the result of an ill-considered and ill-timed system update that went south. Not that the Times isn't sometimes hacked, but yesterday's episode had a pedestrian explanation.

Re: Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site

#5
So what are best guesses here? Weeks of surveillance and social engineering or a 0-day/unpatched software?

I just feel like these sites should be getting scanned daily by all kinds of frameworks like metasploit so unpatched known vuln seems unlikely.

More likely is exploiting the employees with spear phishing or social engineering, or 0day. And of those three I'd have to lean towards 0day, if it truly was Syrians that did it.

And if they got socialflow at almost the same time I'm betting they were using something in common.

Though considering the post claims an employee account was hacked through phishing, maybe they had shared accounts for columnists or something.

Re: Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site

#6
post #5

So what are best guesses here? Weeks of surveillance and social engineering or a 0-day/unpatched software? I just feel like these sites should be getting scanned daily by all kinds of frameworks like metasploit so unpatched known vuln seems unlikely. More likely is exploiting the employees with spear phishing or social engineering, or 0day. And of those three I'd have to lean towards 0day, if it truly was Syrians tha…

Why are you leaning towards 0days if Syrians did it? What makes Syrians more likely to have and use 0days than to use social engineering?

Re: Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site

#8
post #5

So what are best guesses here? Weeks of surveillance and social engineering or a 0-day/unpatched software? I just feel like these sites should be getting scanned daily by all kinds of frameworks like metasploit so unpatched known vuln seems unlikely. More likely is exploiting the employees with spear phishing or social engineering, or 0day. And of those three I'd have to lean towards 0day, if it truly was Syrians tha…

[deleted]

Re: Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site

#9
post #5

So what are best guesses here? Weeks of surveillance and social engineering or a 0-day/unpatched software? I just feel like these sites should be getting scanned daily by all kinds of frameworks like metasploit so unpatched known vuln seems unlikely. More likely is exploiting the employees with spear phishing or social engineering, or 0day. And of those three I'd have to lean towards 0day, if it truly was Syrians tha…

According to this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Official_SEA16/status/368038668709019648

They effectively didn't hack WaPo at all- they hacked Outbrain, and ad provider network, which embeds ads on the WaPo site. Which is a kind of fascinating way to side-step a lot of work I'm sure WaPo have done up until now.

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