Only yesterday when Facebook was celebrating its 10 year anniversary, a group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) reportedly claimed that it had taken control over the Facebook.com domain. However, within half an hour or so, Facebook took back control its domain back at around 6:00 PM Pacific.
What is SEA
This hacker group calls itself the Syrian Electronic Army and that is all we would say about them. By the look of it, SEA was successful in accessing the domain record of Facebook.com from the MarkMonitor Panel. MarkMonitor is an online reputation management company as well as a domain, which is known to have some of the world’s largest companies as customers and offers them some hard-edged portal solutions. After hacking Facebook.com’s domain record, SEA tweeted the evidence of their act in the form of screenshots. The snapshot of the MarkMonitor Admin Panel shared by the Syrian Electronic Army on Twitter, has been displayed above.
However, SEA’s success was quite short-lived as within half an hour Reuters reported that MarkMonitor has regained the control over Facebook’s domain. So, Facebook users have no reason to worry, all is good and controlled in the world of Facebook.com.
The only major concern is that if such a renowned domain like this can be controlled, it’s quite possible to direct the traffic from genuine sites towards other websites which can be used for malicious acts such as gathering personal data of users or infect the visitor accounts with malware. And a much bigger concern is to catch these illegal groups which commit the crime of hacking and get away so easily.
How can organizations protect themselves from such attacks
First and foremost, selecting the most assiduous domain registrar is a must. Although, the reason this hacking attempt has made headlines is not only because of Facebook’s popularity, but also because MarkMonitor is one of the best firms offering secure domain registrations. And that is the reason, that the incident lasted just a couple of minutes as MarkMonitor came to the rescue pretty quickly.
Detailed reports of what actually happened are still awaited. Till then, tell us what your thoughts are on this incident?
