The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) , about whom I have reported to you many times (you can go to the archives of Scamicide to see these stories) has struck again.  This time its victim is Forbes.com, the website of Forbes Magazine.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Syrian Electronic Army, it is a group of hackers sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.  Forbes was targeted by the SEA because of what it called Forbes’ hatred for Syria.  Along with planting a false story on the Forbes website, the SEA also stole user names and email addresses of Forbes.com customers, raising the possibility of “spear phishing” attacks against Forbes.com’s customers.  The SEA has threatened to make the information available on the Internet to identity thieves.  Identity thieves who send phishing emails and texts often do so in large numbers without knowing the names of the people to whom the phony messages corrupted with keystroke logging malware are sent.  However, in spear phishing the identiy thief knows the name of the intended victim and can make the communication look more legitimate by containing the victim’s name.  In addition, the spear phishing text or email can be made to look as if it comes from Forbes.com or some other entity that is trusted and used by the victim which also can lead the victim to be less skeptical of the message and make the victim more likely to click on links in the message or download attachments to the message corrupted with malware.

TIPS

Again, the lesson is that you are only as secure as the places with the weakest security that hold your personal information.  If you are a subscriber to Forbes.com, you should change your password.  If you use the same password elsewhere, change it too.  For convenience many people make the mistake of using the same password for all of their accounts, which means that when your password is stolen from one place, all of your accounts using that password are in jeopardy.  This is a good lesson for all of us regardless of whether or not you were a victim in this particular data breach.  This hacking once again raises the question as to why major corporate websites, such as the many who have been hacked by the SEA are not doing more to keep their computers secure.  Finally, as I always remind you, never click on links in emails or text messages or download attachments unless you are absolutely sure that they a legitimate and have confirmed this to be so.