The Syrian Electronic Army, a group of pro-Assad-regime hackers, has decided to celebrate today by infesting a bunch of popular news websites with cheery Thanksgiving popups informing people that they've been hacked (spoiler: they haven't).
While the SEA has claimed to have 'hacked' a series of websites — which include big names like Forbes, The Telegraph and Canada's CBC — the popups were actually the result of one compromised web service. Gigya is a company that provides audience analytics, and it looks like trickery with the DNS system has led to websites that use Gigya displaying the pop-up you can see above. According to a statement Gigya provided to The Register:
"Some calls to Gigya domains were redirected to the hackers site or showed a hacking message to end users. It might take some time until the changes propagate to all users. We have worked with GoDaddy to resolve the issue and the redirection was removed."
So, with any luck, it should be business as usual. It's exactly the sort of attack that the SEA is known for: high-profile and attention-grabbing, but ultimately harmless. [The Register]