Early last month, news parody overlord The Onion was hacked.
OK, that’s a little dramatic. What really happened was that “America’s Finest News Source,” notorious for its sometimes over the top, sometimes subtle, satire had its Twitter account hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.
If you don’t know what the Syrian Electronic Army is, you’re not alone—it’s not commonly discussed over dinner or drinks. The SEA supports Syria’s President Bashar
al-Assad and has hacked into several other organizations’ Twitter accounts, including the Associated Press and National Public Radio, in retaliation for what The New York Times reported as “one-sided coverage of the Syrian civil war.”
Once they got into The Onion’s Twitter account, SEA members posted anti-
Israel and anti-Obama “joke” messages.
Twitter accounts get hacked all the time, but it’s usually some backwashed celebrity or unpopular opinion blogger. The Onion, on the other hand, has (ballpark) 5 million followers within the Twittersphere alone.
Since The Onion’s news stories and tweets are satirical, fictional “news,” what could be gained from hostilely taking over its Twitter feed?
Th3 Pr0, a member of the SEA, recently told The New York Times that The Onion “is more trusted to reflect the news than the corporate media is.” And it’s kind
of true.
More and more, corporate media is leaning toward a specific bias, and there aren’t very many media outlets left to trust.
What sparked the SEA’s Onion invasion was an article The Onion published that focused on Syria. The article’s title: “Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me to Kill 70,000 People.”
This offended many Syrians, Th3 Pr0 said, as they really enjoy The Onion’s funny and often nonsensical news stories and rely on the publication’s satirical take on current news and events.
So how does one small Syrian resistance group take on huge media outlets? The group sends out emails to the organization’s employees that contain links to fake login pages or ask for login credentials. Employees who fall for these phishing scams give the SEA the usernames and passwords they need. From there, the SEA burrows in, seeking out Twitter account passwords.
When the group targeted the Associated Press’ Twitter feed, it apparently sent out a fake Washington Post article that a number of employees fell for. The fake tweets said that explosions were going off in the White House. When something as trusted as the Associated Press starts spewing that kind of false news, there are consequences. The stock market fell as soon as that tweet went viral.
News is a dangerous thing.
The Onion’s IT department has been going over new ways to prevent this from happening again. So far, their comebacks involve better educating employees to recognize phishing via email and eliminating universal login information so that social media–login credentials are separate from employees’ general email accounts.
Twitter is also gearing up to start a two-step identification process.
True to form, The Onion has since posted multiple articles mocking the SEA. One in particular, “Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths At Hands Of Rebels,” prompted the SEA to post editorial information online.
And in a playful romp of self-shaming, The Onion posted plenty of stories making fun of itself and its own employees. In one article—“Onion Twitter Password Changed To OnionMan77”—the writer makes fun of its employer, openly mocking the IT specialist, and making light of the whole situation.
By changing the Twitter password, as well as Facebook, employee email and mainframe server passwords to “OnionMan77,” hacking would be impossible and the accounts would be “virtually impenetrable,” the article’s author explained.
What has The Onion learned from this ordeal? Probably not a whole lot about knowing when to stop posting about Syria. Quite a bit, though, about ramping up its social media security.
Like The Onion or not, it and other news sources are very popular, so when something like this happens it can cause a lot of damage (e.g., a drop in the stock market).
Maybe they shouldn’t do things to purposely antagonize Syrian rebel groups. Just a thought.