Syrian Electronic Army Denies Anonymous Exposed Its Members

The Syrian Electronic Army has denied claims its servers were hacked and that two of its core members have been revealed.

The group, which has been responsible for high-profile hits on media organisations, including the most recent attack on the New York Times and others, told TechWeekEurope the data that has been released by those claiming to have hacked the Army did not look genuine.

Actors affiliated with Anonymous appear to have been involved in the supposed hacks, looking at the Twitter feeds of @blackplans and @nbdu1nder. The hacktivist collective is running an OpSyria campaign, targeting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, whom the Syrian Electronic Army backs.

It was claimed the attack happened back in April, when the Syrian Electronic Army was moving hosting of its main website to Russia.

Syrian Electronic Army in denial?

According to claims on a French site, several gigabytes of data had been leaked, including information on alleged members of the group, such as prolific hacker The Pro, as well as email and social media logins.

Vice claimed The Pro was likely a male named Hatem Deeb, which The Pro later denied. The Pro does claim to be part of the SEA, but says Deeb is just a contact of the group, not part of the SEA itself.

A spokesperson from the SEA told TechWeek that Deeb is not The Pro, and also said that They said Ali Farha, another name previously linked to the group, “is a press guy”.

The SEA source also denied claims from security blogger Brian Krebs that another prominent member of the group was called Mohammed Osman.

“The database dump could be for any pro-Syria site,” the spokesperson added. “We want to say, that all SEA members are using fake names and they don’t post their pictures and use their real name.”

Meanwhile, the Syrian Electronic Army has continued to hack various organisations, the latest being the US Marines website. The Marines.com website was defaced and the site was inaccessible at the time of publication.

The group recently told this publication it also carried out malware-based attacks, as well as the Twitter account hijacks and defacements it is famous for. It denied hitting rebel forces with DDoS attacks, indicating others are perpetrating those strikes, which have taken down various sites, including a Scud missile warning service.

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