Forbes.com hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

Business news outlet Forbes confirmed late Friday afternoon that it had been the target of a digital attack, one that appears to have been conducted by the Syrian Electronic Army.

The Syrian Electronic Army has attacked Forbes, stealing user data and posting fake stories to its Web site.
The hacking group announced the exploit on Friday, showing several screenshots of the Wordpress-based backend of the Forbes.com Web site. The organization said in a tweet that more than 1 million user e-mails and passwords were successfully stolen and will be published at some point.

Forbes acknowledged that its Web site and publishing platform were the targets of a hack in a Facebook post on Friday. The company said e-mail addresses may have been exposed but passwords are encrypted. Still, Forbes cautioned readers and contributors to change their passwords as a precaution.

In a security message on Forbes.com, a message posted over the weekend from Forbes staff said, "The email address for anyone registered with Forbes.com may have been exposed." The site has temporarily disabled user logins.

On Friday, the Twitter account of the SEA had this post: "#Forbes users table (1,071,963 user-email-password) was dumped successfully, Anyone want to buy it?" https://twitter.com/Official_SEA16. And in a later tweet, the SEA warned that it was planning to publish a database of all Forbes users as soon as it could find "a secure host" on which to upload it.

The hackers also defaced a number of other pages on the site, and they hijacked the Twitter accounts @ForbesTech, @TheAlexKnapp and @Samsharf.

In addition to stealing usernames, the Syrian Electronic Army posted an article on the site entitled "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army." That article has since been taken down, and there don't appear to be any other posts on the site that have come from the Syrian Electronic Army.
Source : CNET