Syrian Electronic Army has attacked Outbrain service and take control of admin panel. The security breach affects CNN, Washington Post, Times and more high profiles, according to EHackingNews.
Outbrain is a content recommendation service whose widget offers to help internet publishers increase web traffic at their websites. It does so by presenting them with links to articles and other content.
The company was founded by Yaron Galai, who had sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363m, and Ori Lahav, who had previously been with Shopping.com before their purchase by eBay.
Email sent to Publishers:
This morning, the Outbrain service was attacked, and as a result, we have taken the service down temporarily as a precautionary measure.
We are working diligently to investigate the cause and the measures to prevent this in the future. Once we feel that the service is stable, we will bring back the service again.
Please feel free to reach out to your Account Manager in the meantime. Otherwise, we will be in touch with additional updates.
Thanks for your patience.
Update 1:52 PM:
Earlier today, the Outbrain service was hacked and the company took down service as soon as it was apparent. The breach now seems to be secured and the hackers blocked out, says Outbrain CEO. However, they are keeping the service down for a little longer until they can be sure it’s safe to turn it back on securely. More Updates will be posted at techblog.outbrain.com.
Update 4:48 PM via email, officials say:
We have now secured the Outbrain network, verifying the integrity of our code and blocking all external access to our systems. We have also restored system settings to their state prior to the attack.
We expect to resume service within the next few hours. We will let you know when the service is fully restored.
