Syrian Electronic Army Leaks over 1 Million Forbes Logins
Syrian Electronic Army Leaks over 1 Million Forbes Logins
Just one day after the Syrian Electronic Army hacked Forbes website and Twitter, Forbes had over 1 million user login details leaked. Hours after the alleged leak, the Syrian Electronic Army took credit and posted a public link on Twitter to all of the leaked accounts. 1,071,587 accounts were leaked to be exact. The Syrian Electronic Army posted the leak on Twitter in a .txt file on a secured host.
The leaked accounts contain everything from readers, to authors, to admins, and to super admins. Forbes has accounted for the breach, and put out an official statement reading
Forbes.com was targeted in a digital attack and our publishing platform was compromised. Users’ email addresses may have been exposed. The passwords were encrypted, but as a precaution, we strongly encourage Forbes readers and contributors to change their passwords on our system, and encourage them to change them on other websites if they use the same password elsewhere. We have notified law enforcement. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to the members of our community for this breach.
The host that is hosting the .txt leak files is still live and serving the files (24 hours later). The hosting website is located in the United Kingdom, and the Syrian Electronic Army stated they uploaded the database to a secured host. Syrian Electronic Army noted their motive for the hack was
Many articles against the SEA were posted on Forbes, also their hate for Syria is very clear and flagrant in their articles.
(Later they also noted)
We didn’t publish the user table of Forbes to show off, but because they deserved to be embarrassed.
#SEA
The Syrian Electronic Army group is notorious for hacking high profile websites, and high trafficked media outlets. They have hacked New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the AP, The Guardian, Skype, Microsoft, CNN, Facebook, Vice, and many others over the past year.
Update: As of February 15, 2014 the Syrian Electrnoic Army noted
The user tables have been deleted, we are no longer publishing them. Please change your passwords if you have a login on Forbes.#SEA
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) February 16, 2014
