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The Syrian civil war is also a propaganda war. With the
Assad regime and the rebels both attempting to assure their supporters and the
world that they are on the brink of victory, how the facts are reported has
become central to the struggle. Hackers working in support of Assad loyalists
this week decided to take a shortcut, attacking the Reuters news agency's blogging
platform and one of its Twitter
accounts, and planting
false stories about the vanquishing of rebel leaders and wavering support
for them from abroad.
The stories and tweets were unconvincing, and none spread
much further than their home sites. The majority
of readers disseminating the repurposed Twitter stream appeared to be Assad
partisans, either keen to spread the misconceptions or to believe them
themselves.
The attacks demonstrate, however, how media institutions are
at risk of targeted attacks by state-supported
electronic activists--and that hackers will attempt to leverage the outlying
parts of a large organization to take wider control, or at least the appearance
of wider control.
Neither Reuters' blogging site nor its minor Twitter accounts
feed the company's authoritative wire service, but as a consequence they may
not have the same levels of heavy protection against misuse. A weak password
used by a single person could have granted an outsider the power to post
publicly to either service.
Even when a hacker's target is an individual journalist and
not his or her media organization, things can escalate to affect the
institutions journalists work for. When the tech reporting site Gizmodo's Twitter account was taken over
on Friday, it was through an attack on one of
its former reporters, Mat Honan. Gizmodo's
reporting has made
it unpopular in some quarters, but Honan says that he was the target, and
that Gizmodo was "collateral
damage." His Twitter account was linked to Gizmodo's corporate account, and the attackers used one to post to
the other.
Honan's story should give anyone pause about their own
digital safety, especially if they rely on external companies. His Twitter
account was taken over by a hacker who persuaded a tech support line operator
to reset the password to his Apple account. The attacker used this account to
change his linked Gmail and Twitter account information, and then proceeded to
use the "remote wipe" feature on the latest Apple iPhone and laptops
to disable and delete the content of his phone, iPad and Macbook. As a
freelancer, Honan did not have offline backup of his work. (Honan says he is
waiting for a response from Apple the company; meanwhile, Apple tech support is helping
with damage control).
Honan has corresponded with an individual who claims to be
his hacker, and says that the real intent of the compromise was his three-letter Twitter account. Whether
it's by common cybercriminals or state-supported propagandists, journalists are
being targeted as individuals. The organizations that employ them need to
invest resources and training to improve their cyber-security; not least
because when one person's security is compromised, everyone who relies on that
person is also under threat.
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