The Syrian Electronic Army added to its Microsoft trophies over the weekend, hijacking two Microsoft Twitter accounts and defacing one of its blogs—and more attacks could be in store.
The hacker group, which has made a name for itself by hijacking high profile social media accounts and defacing news sites, has its sights on Microsoft, this time taking over its Twitter accounts @MSFTnews and @XboxSupport.
Over the weekend, the group posted several quickly-removed messages under Microsoft’s name, warning Microsoft’s followers: “Don’t use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments”.
It’s the second time in the past fortnight the group has targeted Microsoft’s social media accounts. The last was a hit on January 2 on Microsoft’s Skype, which lost control over its official blog, as well as its Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The SEA posted the same message on Skype’s hijacked profiles.
The SEA also managed to deface Microsoft’s TechNet Blogs pages and forced visitors across to its own site before Microsoft took the site down on Saturday for maintenance.
Microsoft’s blog pages were restored on Saturday and the company has reclaimed control over the affected accounts.
Microsoft also responded to the SEA’s claim it was “selling” email data to governments, telling Mashable that it only provides customer data in response to specific, targeted, legal demands from governments around the world — the type it began publishing details about last year.
Though Microsoft dealt with the nuisance swiftly, the company can expect to see more attacks, according to a comment from one SEA member “Syrian Eagle”.
"We can only say that's just the beginning," the SEA member told Mashable, adding that Microsoft’s data-sharing with intelligence and governments has affected the group.
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