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Syrian Electronic Army Claims Responsibility For Hacking U.S. Army Website

This article is more than 8 years old.

The U.S. Army's public website has been taken offline after hackers compromised the site on Monday. On Twitter , the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) took credit for the attack.

Before the Army's website was taken down, a message appeared on the page, claiming that the SEA was responsible for hacking the website. The SEA is a group of hackers who support Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. A pop-up  message told visitors: "Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting." Around 1 p.m. ET, the SEA began tweeting about the attack, taking credit for hacking the website:


At approximately 3:30pm ET, the Fort Bragg Facebook page told people to avoid using the Army website because of the hack, saying "Avoid using www.army.mil for the time being. The web site is currently down, reportedly from being hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army."

U.S. officials confirmed that an attack had taken place and that the Army website had been taken offline. The government did not name the SEA as the group behind the attack.

"Today an element of the Army.mil service provider's content was compromised," said Brigadier General Malcolm Frost, chief of Army public affairs, in a statement. "After this came to our attention, the Army took appropriate preventive measures to ensure there was no breach of Army data by taking down the website temporarily."

The Syrian Electronic Army has a long history of hacking websites and then taking credit for their actions to send a political message. Most recently in May 2015, the SEA hacked the Washington Post and redirected visitors to a site under SEA control. A number of other news sites have been compromised by the SEA, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and Forbes. In 2013, the hacker group got access to the Associated Press Twitter account and announced that the White House had been attacked, creating a stock market panic.

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