Washington Post Website Down, Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

The Washington Post announced on Thursday that members of the Syrian Electronic Army managed to hack into their website.

"The Washington Post Web site was hacked today, with readers on certain stories being redirected to the site of the Syrian Electronic Army," The Post said in a message placed on their site a few minutes after the got word that the page had been compromised. "The group is a hacker collective that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Post is working to resolve this issue."

A couple hours after the initial post, Managing Editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz further explained the situation with the SEA.

"A few days ago, the Syrian Electronic Army, allegedly, subjected Post newsroom employees to a sophisticated phishing attack to gain password information," he stated. "The attack resulted in one staff writer's personal Twitter account being used to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message."

Some links to Post articles were also redirected to the SEA's site, Garcia-Ruiz mentioned. He said that the SEA tweeted that they had gotten into the website by gaining access to Outbrain, a site with whom the Post does business.

The Washington Post "removed the offending module" and is not experiencing further problems at this time.

According to the Huffington Post, this isn't the first time the SEA has targeted news outlets. The Financial Times, Reuters, BSkyB and ITV News have all fallen prey to the hackers. In the past couple of weeks, the Guardian and Channel 4 also have encountered online issues at the hands of the SEA. The SEA is most well known for having posted a fake tweet from the Associated Press' Twitter account claiming that the White House had been attacked.

The stock market fell sharply shortly after this Tweet, but once it was confirmed as a fake, financials stabilized once more.