Syrian Electronic Army Hacks Microsoft Twitter Accounts

The Syrian Electronic Army struck again Saturday, hacking a Twitter account that belongs to Microsoft.

The Microsoft News (@MSFTnews) account posted the following tweet just after 2:30 p.m. ET, before it was quickly removed.

The SEA also tweeted the following screenshot of other tweets and retweets it allegedly posted to the Microsoft News account.

'We can only say that's just the beginning,' an SEA member called 'Syrian Eagle' told Mashable in an email. The group also hacked an Xbox Twitter account (@XboxSupport) earlier Saturday, The Drum reported.

When asked why the SEA targeted Microsoft, Syrian Eagle provided the following response:

Microsoft is monitoring emails accounts and selling the data for the American intelligence and other governments.

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 hack comes just 10 days after the group, known to favor Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, took over Skype's Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as its official blog. Microsoft, which owns the VoIP service, issued a warning to discourage people from using Microsoft emails following the New Year's Day hack.

The group went on to further taunt Microsoft on Saturday by tweeting a supposed photo of an internal company email discussing the recent hacks. There's reason to believe the email might be bogus, as it seems unlikely that a Microsoft employee would put a hashtag before 'SEA' in the subject line of an email about getting hacked. The alleged email is shown, below, with the names of the Microsoft employees redacted.

UPDATE - Jan. 11, 5:15 p.m. ET: 'Microsoft is aware of targeted cyberattacks 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,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Mashable on Saturday.

UPDATE - Jan. 11, 7:10 p.m. ET: The SEA briefly took control of a blog that appears to be affiliated with Microsoft. For a period of about an hour Saturday night, the blog at http://ift.tt/1dmT2Oy, which is titled 'The Official Microsoft Blog,' displayed SEA messages and redirected to the hacking group's website for at least some users. While some Twitter users said the blog was functioning normally after the SEA bragged of the redirect, this is what other users (including us) saw:

By 8:20 p.m. ET, the site was taken down. Microsoft has not yet replied to our inquiry into this most recent hack, but the company did respond with the following statement to the SEA's assertion that Microsoft is monitoring emails and selling the data to American and foreign intelligence agencies.

We're actively investigating issues and are focused on protecting our employees and corporate network. Microsoft is sometimes obligated to comply with legal orders from governments around the world and provides customer data only in response to specific, targeted, legal demands.

UPDATE - Jan. 11 9:30 p.m. ET: The TechNet blog appearing to belong to Microsoft is back up and functioning regularly.

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