by David Hollingworth , Shona Ghosh
Hackers have hijacked Microsoft’s official blog and two social media accounts for the second time in a month.
The group known as the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which supports the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, this time took over the @MSFTNews and @XboxSupport accounts. It then posted messages on both accounts warning users off Microsoft.
The group also broke into TechNet blogs, posting an entry declaring “Syrian Electronic Army Was Here…long live Syria!” before redirecting to its own site.
The hack echoes an earlier breach two weeks ago when the SEA took over Skype’s social-media accounts and posted messages warning users about Microsoft’s alleged complicity with government surveillance.
The group posted similar warnings this time round. “Don’t use Microsoft emails (Hotmail, Outlook),” the group wrote on @MSFTNews. “They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments.”
It then used the account to promote Firefox and Chrome, rival web browsers to Internet Explorer.
The SEA posted screenshots to its own account purporting to be emails sent by Microsoft employees discussing the hack.
Microsoft has not confirmed whether the emails are genuine but said its TechNet blogs and social-media accounts were back up and running as normal.
“Microsoft is aware of targeted cyber-attacks that temporarily affected the Xbox Support and Microsoft News Twitter accounts,” the company said in a statement. “The accounts were quickly reset and we can confirm that no customer information was compromised.”
This follows the hacking of Melbourne IT and local tech site MacTalk coming under fire from the SEA last year.
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk
