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Daily Telegraph and The Independent web sites compromised by “Syrian Electronic Army”

I’m getting reports from people reading the Daily Telegraph web site saying that a dialog box saying “You have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)”. The implication is that their PCs have been compromised, but I have no evidence that this is actually true. The web sites of the newspapers do appear to have been breached, however, in order to cause the pop-ups to appear.

Reports already exist of the problems with the Independent and the Evening Standard, with a time of 12:20 GMT, but the Telegraph problem appears to be new.

The problems don’t appear on all pages of the Telegraph – in fact the problem seems to be on the Alex cartoon only. The Independent has been off-line, but at time of writing is back – but slow.

Given the preponderance of adverts on this page, one possible method of attack could be via the advert feed. It certainly doesn’t happen of every access. However, reports suggest of a redirect to a page showing the Syrian logo. This could be JavaScript, a server change or a DNS hijack. People at the papers probably know which, but they’re a bit busy right now…

 

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WikiYawn

So, Wikileaks has dumped a whole load of US diplomatic dispatches on the web. What fun. What interesting tit-bits can be gleened?

Well, it seems like some US diplomats think Robert Mugabee, Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are all bad news. Fancy that. Who’d have thought it? Another diplomat thinks Prince Andrew was a rather forthright on a trade mission – calling the abortive fraud investigation a waste of time. What did this diplomat expect? Kissing babies and collecting flowers?

Apparently a lot of people on the Middle East don’t trust the Iranian’s nuclear programme and want something done about it. No kidding!

This isn’t news. There’s no conspiricy theory being confirmed. This is all an exercise in the art of the obvious. It might have been interesting to learn that South Korea and China weren’t perparing for a change of reigime in the North, but no, they’re on the case.

With no jucy conspiricy being reported, one might wonder what all the fuss has been about. So here’s a conspiricy theory about the conspiricy theory: The news media are reporting all this non-news to distract attention from some really interesting stuff buried in the 250,000 documents released. Perhaps, but given that (apparently) two and a half million American government employees have access to this stuff anyway, if there was anything really new to be found it’d be out in the open anyway.