How Syrian Electronic Army Unpeeled The Onion

Satire site The Onion details multi-pronged Twitter account takeover strategies used by hacktivists.

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Satire site
The Onion
has offered a glimpse into the techniques used by the Twitter account takeover artists known as the Syrian Electronic Army.
The campaign launched by the hacktivist group wasnt complex, although it did involve several waves of attacks, resulting in multiple compromised systems and credentials, according to
How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
, posted Wednesday to the satire sites Tech Blog.
Heres how the attack commenced: Starting Friday, May 3, a handful of
Onion
employees received emails that asked them to read a story, and included an apparent
Washington Post
link. In reality, the link led to a hacked WordPress site, which redirected to a googlecom.comeze.com site that requested their Google Apps credentials, which, if entered, redirected users to their Gmail account.
These emails were sent from strange, outside addresses, and they were sent to few enough employees to appear as just random noise rather than a targeted attack, according to the
Onions
attack overview. At least one
Onion
employee fell for this phase of the phishing attack.
[ Is it easier to catch a hacker with honey?
Sweet Password Security Strategy: Honeywords
. ]
Early Monday morning, attackers used the compromised account to send the same phishing message to more employees. Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials. Two staff members did enter their credentials, one of whom had access to all of our social media accounts, according to the
Onions
recap.
The same day, attackers
defaced the
Onions
Twitter account page
and began issuing bogus tweets. In response, the
Onions
IT team issued a company-wide alert, telling all employees to reset their Google Apps passwords. But attackers used another account that theyd compromised to issue their own
password-reset warning
. To make this third wave of attacks more difficult to detect, attackers cleverly didnt send the phishing email -- which included a password-reset link that instead redirected to the malicious phishing website that requested a users Google Apps credentials -- to any IT employees.
This third and final phishing attack compromised at least two more accounts, according to the attack overview. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account. At that point, the IT department forced all employees to reset their Google Apps passwords, which allowed them to finally regain control of the accounts and begin a mop-up operation.
The Syrian Electronic Army is allied to the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, and hacktivist group member Th3 Pr0 told
The New York Times
that the
Onion
Twitter account takeover was
meant to be revenge
for its recent Assad-attributed editorial titled Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me To Kill 70,000 People.
What lessons can be learned from the successful Syrian Electronic Army phishing attack against the
Onion
? The companys IT team reported that a few simple security measures would have blocked the attacks. For starters, the attacker connected to compromised accounts from the IP address 46.17.103.125, which is the same domain used to host a
Syrian Electronic Army leaks website
. Obviously, blocking all connections from that IP address, or other sites associated with the group, would be a good start.
To help block phishing attacks, the IT team also recommended using one email address system for everyday emails, and an entirely different one for Twitter accounts. In addition, it said that employing an intermediary social media management system such as
Hootsuite
would make it much more difficult for an attacker to fully compromise an organizations Twitter accounts.
For an industry thats predicated on reporting, its notable that the
Onion
is the first news outlet -- satirical or straight -- to detail exactly how its Twitter accounts were owned by the Syrian Electronic Army. Thats despite the hacktivist group having exploited the Twitter feeds of such organizations as National Public Radio, Reuters, the BBC
and the
Guardian
.
But the Syrian Electronic Armys most infamous outing to date was its compromise of multiple AP Twitter feeds, which it used to issue a hoax alert that President Obama had been
injured in explosions
at the White House. The compromise led to reports that Twitter was finally
prepping two-factor authentication
to help users block some types of account takeovers.
According to the Syrian Electronic Army, it seized control of the AP accounts via a phishing campaign that compromised at least 50 employees at the news agency, including social media editors.
People are your most vulnerable endpoint. Make sure your security strategy addresses that fact. Also in the new, all-digital
How Hackers Fool Your Employees
issue of Dark Reading: Effective security doesnt mean stopping all attackers. (Free registration required.)

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