Outbrain hacked, Controls The Washington Post, CNN and Time to SEA

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Source: Syrian Hackers Use Outbrain to Target The Washington Post, Time, and CNN

For a brief period on Thursday morning, the Washington Post's website redirected some visitors to a webpage controlled by the Syrian Electronic Army. In a brief statement, the site didn't indicate how the infiltration occurred, but subsequent reports suggest that the hackers were able to manipulate a content recommendation service The Post uses on its site.

On Twitter, the SEA demonstrated that it had gained access to the administrative panel of Outbrain, a third-party system that provides those "Other stories from around the web" recommendations at the bottom of articles at numerous web sites, including at The Atlantic Wire. How the redirect worked isn't clear, but it's possible that the hackers were able to manipulate the code included on Post articles to include a simple redirect to an external site. The group claimed to have done the same thing on other sites, including CNN and Time.