Maryanne Moll, Tech Times

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has struck again, leaving Microsoft embarrassed but still trying to keep its head above the water. On Monday, soon after Microsoft unveiled the newly redesigned Office Blogs, SEA hacked the blog and defaced the site with several articles with titles "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army."

The SEA also posted a screenshot of it on the its Twitter feed. The Office Blogs would have featured new filtering options and an improved interface for viewing on smartphones or tablets. Instead, it carried the SEA articles, which have been removed since.

This marks the third time in one months that the SEA has attacked sites and accounts that belong to Microsoft. At the beginning of the year, the group hacked the Twitter account, blog and Facebook page of popular VoIP service Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2011.

Soon thereafter, Microsoft acknowledged that the SEA also managed to hack into some of its employees' email accounts.

Both Microsoft and the SEA did not say whether any confidential data or information was compromised. However, Microsoft assured that the hackers were not able to access customer information. The company also said the compromised accounts have already been reset and the leak has been plugged.

The SEA, however, promised that it was not yet done with Microsoft.

To prove that it had indeed hacked the Office Blogs, the SEA also tweeted photos of the hack, showing the rogue article and the CMS (old and the new) of the Office Blogs.

The SEA also taunted Microsoft, saying that changing the CMS will do very little to prevent the hack especially when its employees' email accounts have been hacked and they don't know about it.

Following the latest attack on Office Blogs, the SEA also said that it's not yet over. "We can only say that's just the beginning," an SEA member called 'Syrian Eagle' said in an email. "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 hacker said.

The SEA is a group of hackers that closely follow the ideals of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, though the hackers' connection with the president hasn't been proven yet. The group mostly hijacks websites of Western companies and human rights organizations, and make these hacked websites carry redirects and embarrassing content and claims that point to security issues. Some of the sites that fell prey to the SEA are The New York Times, the Associated Press, Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC and Al Jazeera.

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Tags: Microsoft phishing Syrian Electronic Army Office Blogs hackers Hacking
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