Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was the target of hackers over the weekend, as they took down the company’s official blog and two of its official Twitter accounts. According to the BBC, the Syrian Electronic Army is believed to have been behind those attacks.
Microsoft takes action against hackers
The hackers reportedly posted messages in support of Syrian and which criticized Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). The two Twitter accounts which were compromised were the @MSFTnews account and the @XboxSupport account. The hackers told people to quit using Outlook and Hotmail and claimed that Microsoft monitored both email services and sold data to governments.
After the company realized what had happened, it closed the accounts and its blog for “maintenance.” In a statement, it said that the hackers did not compromise any customer information. The Syrian Electronic Army took screen grabs of what it had apparently posted and put them on its Twitter feed.
MIT also targeted by hackers
Microsoft wasn’t the only one targeted by hackers over the weekend. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was targeted on Jan. 11, which was the one-year anniversary of the suicide of hacktivist Aaron Swartz. He took his own life on that date in 2013, possibly because he was being aggressively prosecuted by U.S. officials for reportedly downloading millions of academic articles from a database run by MIT. During Saturday’s attack on MIT, the hackers reportedly took over the university’s website for an hour, redirecting visits to a page which focused was about a campaign against governmental surveillance of the Internet.
Dropbox was another company which was said to be targeted by hackers recently, but apparently this recent claim was nothing but a hoax. The cloud storage company said it simply took its website down for scheduled maintenance which went on for quite a while.
[drizzle]Hackers have been extremely busy of late. Over the weekend it was also revealed that Neiman Marcus and three more unidentified U.S. retailers were targeted by hackers during the holiday shopping season. With Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT), that brings the tally of retailers which had their customers’ payments information stolen up to five.
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