Syrian Army Hacks Forbes Website, Over 1 Million User Info Compromised

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacked the Forbes' website on Friday and compromised more than a million user information.

SEA, taking a cue from its name, is a group of hackers from Syria who supports the Syrian government and target political opposition groups and western websites, including media organizations and human rights advocates group.

On its Facebook and Twitter page, Forbes acknowledged that their website, Forbes.com, was indeed hacked and several user info of its former and recent employees, including e-mail addresses and passwords, were stolen.

Though the American business magazine reassured all of its users that all passwords are encrypted, they still highly advise users to change their passwords on the website. The company also advises their users to be cautious in opening or responding to e-mails coming from Forbes as it may be utilized in phishing activities.

Additionally, the group managed to edit about three published articles and create their own one-liner article stating, "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army."

Roughly a day after the hacking, the SEA said that they have published a list of all user information they have stolen from the site.

Re/code reported that it saw the list and confirmed that it has names, e-mail addresses, and passwords of people who work and have worked with Forbes. But since the passwords are encrypted, they were presented as hashes.

"Hashes" is the term used to describe a password that isn't displayed in plain text. Meaning to say, if your password is "abcd1234", it will appear as "b87%h^.65$#" in the list. However, users shouldn't take chances because experts who have adequate knowledge about computing or password hashing can decode an encrypted password.

As of press time, forbes.com is still down and inaccessible, which implies that the site was greatly affected.

In a closing note in its Facebook post, the company said, "We have notified law enforcement. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to the members of our community for this breach."