PayPal and eBay Fall Victim to the Syrian Electronic Army

Hacking group the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) defaced pages of PayPal and its owner, eBay, in a “hacktivist operation” meant to draw attention to the e-commerce sites` absence in Syria, according to Mashable.

The homepages of eBay and PayPal in France, Israel and the UK were replaced with the SEA logo and a note reading: “Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. Long live Syria. F**k the United States government.”

The group also modified the DNS records of ebay.co.uk and paypal.co.uk, which permitted the hackers to shut down the website and redirect traffic to another server.

On Twitter, the SEA shared screenshots of the admin panels of eBay and PayPal France. They also posted the following message: “If your PayPal account is down for a few minutes, think about Syrians who were denied online payments for more than 3 years. #SEA”.

The hackers did not target users. “We didn’t do it to hack people accounts,” an SEA member told Mashable.

PayPal confirmed today that no user was affected.

“For a brief period today, a very limited number of people visiting certain PayPal and eBay marketing pages in the UK, France and India were redirected,” Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s Senior Director of global initiatives, told Mashable. “The issue was quickly detected and resolved. No customer data was accessed by these redirects, and no customer accounts were affected.”

The SEA is responsible for high-profile cyber-attacks against sites of the BBC News, The Associated Press, National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post, CNN and Microsoft.