The the link shortening tool used by the official Twitter and Facebook accounts of Barack Obama has apparently been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA.)
Once the supporters of embattled Syrian president Bashar Assad had taken control of the tool, which compresses long website addresses into a short link for ease of posting, they were able to manipulate posted links on the president’s Facebook and Twitter account to redirect them so that they led to a video claiming to show atrocities committed by U.S.-backed rebels. The links have now been returned to their original state.
Obama Facebook account hacked – Courtesy of infowars.com
Speaking to infowars.com the SEA has confirmed that it was behind the attack.
The SEA has also posted a screen capture of the inbox of an @barackobama gmail account inbox which they claim to have obtained access to.
Obama Gmail account hacked – Courtesy of infowars.com
The twitter account for the SEA has since tweeted:
We accessed many Obama campaign emails accounts to assess his terrorism capabilities. They are quite high #SEA
and
Obama doesn’t have any ethical issues with spying on the world, so we took it upon ourselves to return the favor. #SEA
When asked about the attack at the White House Press conference, Press Secretary Jay Carney said that he did not have a comment. Speaking to CNBC, a Twitter representative said: “It appears a custom, third-party URL shortener which OFA uses to produce vanity URLs was compromised, not the Twitter account.”
The SEA has been active over the last year fighting a cyber war in retaliation for U.S. support for Sunni rebels opposed to Assad.