Syrian Electronic Army hijacks CNN social media accounts

One of the posts on CNN's main Twitter account stated: "Syrian Electronic Army was here...Stop lying... All your reports are fake!"

The group which claims loyalty to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad also posted messages referring to US president Barack Obama as "the lord of terror".

It is understood that the SEA was able to gain access to CNN's Hootsuite account, an online tool used to manage social media accounts. Through this it was able to briefly take control of CNN's main Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as CNN Politics' Facebook account and several blogs.

Experts believe that the method used to compromise such accounts is through relatively unsophisticated phishing scams that target employee's email addresses.

Rick Ferguson, vice president of security research at  Trend Micro, previously explained to ITProPortal his understanding of how such attacks from the SEA took place.

"Key individuals in the target enterprise would have received well-crafted and convincing emails, either with a malicious file attached, or containing a credible-looking link," Ferguson said.

"Once compromised through either infection or phishing, then the account usernames and passwords would be available to the attacker, allowing further malicious activity."

Unless a way to protect against such attacks is introduced, it is unlikely to be the last