Syrian Electronic Army trolls CNN after hacking into Twitter, Facebook accounts and blogs

The Syrian Electronic Army has struck another US-based media organisation, and the victim this time is CNN.  The full list of attacked social network accounts include CNN's main Facebook account, CNN Politics' Facebook account and the Twitter pages for CNN and CNN's 'Security Clearance'. However the hacking wasn't limited to social media. CNN's Blogs for 'Political Ticker', 'The Lead', 'Security Clearance', 'The Situation Room' and 'Crossfire' were also hacked. Some of the tweets from the hacked account included how al-Qaeda was funded by CIA and that "Obama Bin Laden" was lying that Syrian state controlled al-Qaeda in Syria. CNN later sent out a tweet saying that its social media accounts were compromised but it had managed to bring the problem under control. 

Some of our organization's social media accounts were compromised. We have secured those accounts and deleted unauthorized tweets. — CNN (@CNN) January 24, 2014

 In fact as part of the attack, a fake article was posted on the Security Clearance Blog which had the following headline: "US declares state of national emergency, State department reportedly out of reach." The article's headline was also tweeted out. According to TechWorm a member of the Syrian Electronic Army, "Th3Pr0" confirmed how they were able to hack CNN by compromising HotSuite Accounts of CNN, and few emails which helped them to gain access to CNN's WordPress blog. Syrian Electronic Army also tweeted it's reasons for hacking into CNN's account, saying that the media house had been lying in its news reports and the hacking was a retaliation for all the lies. The group has previously hacked accounts of Skype, as well as The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and other media organisations. Here the SEA's tweets on why they hacked CNN: 

Tonight, the #SEA decided to retaliate against #CNN's viciously lying reporting aimed at prolonging the suffering in #Syria. — SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) January 24, 2014

  

Instead of any actual journalism, #CNN turned into a loud horn calling for the destruciton of the #Syria-n state. — SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) January 24, 2014