Microsoft has had a further two Twitter accounts hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.
After the hacktivists hit the account of Skype last week and posted anti-Government and anti-Microsoft comments, now the Twitter accounts of the gaming console Xbox and its own news feed have been taken over.
Attackers took over the @MSFTnews and @XboxSupport accounts on Saturday and posted various messages hash-tagged “SEA”, according to the Register. Although the messages are no longer live, one tweet read: “Don’t use Microsoft emails (Hotmail, outlook), they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments.”
In a response to Mashable, the Syrian Electronic Army said that it targeted Microsoft as it was “monitoring emails accounts and selling the data for the American intelligence and other governments.”
It went on to say: “And we will publish more details and documents that prove it. Microsoft is not our enemy but what they are doing affected the SEA.”
The attackers were also apparently able to take control of the official Microsoft blog at blogs.technet.com, and either force a redirect to their own site or display a homepage defaced with Syrian Electronic Army slogans.
In the Xbox takeover, hardcoregamer.com said that the Syrian Electronic Army sent out a barrage of “SEA was here” tweets, and said that it was able to take control of the account due to the poor password strength.
In a statement sent to Mashable and the Register, Microsoft said that it was “aware of targeted cyber attacks that temporarily affected the Xbox Support and Microsoft News Twitter accounts. The accounts were quickly reset and we can confirm that no customer information was compromised.”
