Syrian Electronic Army hacks hosting services for 'supporting' terrorist websites

The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has hacked into the control systems of five web hosting services, claiming they are supporting terrorist websites.

The SEA, which has previously been linked to the Assad regime, announced that it had hacked the systems of Bluehost, Justhost, Hostgator, Fastdomain and Hostmonster, all services which are part of Endurance Group. The group also attacked the Twitter account of Bluehost.

The hackers were able to gain access to the company's control systems which would have allowed them to cause a huge amount of damage. However, it is unclear just how much damage was caused, and when asked about the attack, Endurance Group simply said:

"On Sunday evening, Bluehost's Twitter account was compromised for a short period of time. We were able to regain control of that Twitter account within a few hours. We are continuing to investigate this matter, but are viewing this as an unfortunate case of cybervandalism. We have taken all appropriate security measures to ensure that our platform is secure and will continue to conduct a thorough review of this incident."

None of the public Twitter accounts belonging to the five affected hosting services have commented on the attack.

The group of hackers has posted several images on its website of the control systems of the hosting services and has warned that next time it would change the DNS setting, which would knock all websites hosted on a particular service offline.

When asked by IBTimes UK which terrorist websites in particular it felt Endurance Group was hosting, the SEA pointed towards this tweet, which claims the group has hacked a website called Islam-Army.com which is offline at the time of publication (though a mirror of what looks like the hacked website can be found here).

An online search reveals that the website was registered by Fastdomain and hosted on Bluehost servers.

The SEA was also able to hack the Twitter account of Bluehost but the account appears to be back under the control of the company who has removed the offending tweets.

The SEA, which has just recently launched a new website, claims no financial links with the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, despite continuing reports to the contrary.

The SEA rose to prominence following high profile attacks on Western media organisations (including IBTimes.com), the most high profile of which was an attack on the Associated Press Twitter account which led the stock market to crash after a message was published saying the White House had been attacked.