BBC Weather's Twitter account is hijacked by Syrian Electronic Army

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Filed Under: Featured, Twitter

A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army has hijacked the official Twitter account of BBC Weather and started posting some strange messages which aren't the typical "partly cloudy.. showers likely" fare you would normally expect.

For instance:

Hazardous fog warning for North Syria: Erdogan orders terrorists to launch chemical weapons at civilian areas

and

Saudi weather station down due to head on-collision with camel

An earlier message claims that the hack of the BBC's Weather account was by a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army.

Whether the legitimate owners of the @BBCWeather account were phished, had their password cracked, or made the mistake of using the same password in multiple places isn't currently clear - but what is obvious is that right now they have no control over their account.

And meanwhile, almost 60,000 Twitter users are getting weather reports from the Syrian Electronic Army instead.

The good news is that the hack doesn't appear to have been done with the intention of spreading malicious links, or scams. Instead, it appears that the Syrian Electronic Army are trying to spread political messages about Syria instead.

Thank for hanging out with us! To know the truth about the global terrorist war on #Syria, follow @Official_SEA #SEA

Remember, you should always use hard-to-guess, hard-to-crack, unique passwords for your online accounts that you are not using anywhere else on the web.

Once again, a corporate brand is left wishing that Twitter offered some additional levels of protection - such as two factor authentication.

Update: The BBC has told Naked Security that it is investigating the hack.

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Thanks to Naked Security reader @rowansingh for bringing this incident to our attention.

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Skype users warned of serious security problem - accounts can be hijacked with ease

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A serious security problem has been uncovered in Skype, which allows hackers to hijack accounts just by knowing users' email addresses.

The Next Web describes how it managed to reproduce the attack, accessing the Skype accounts of staff by just knowing their email address, and then changing the passwords of their "victims" to lock them out.

According to The Next Web:

"The reason this works is simple, but it's still worrying. When you use an existing email address to sign up with Skype again, the service emails you a reminder of your username, which is okay, since no one else should have access to your email. Unfortunately, because this method enables you to get a password reset token sent to the Skype app itself, this allows a third party to redeem it and claim ownership of your original username and thus account."

The issue was reportedly documented on Russian forums months ago, and appears to have been easy to exploit.

Skype has responded to the reports by temporarily disabling password resets for Skype accounts, and published a brief advisory to users:

"We have had reports of a new security vulnerability issue. As a precautionary step we have temporarily disabled password reset as we continue to investigate the issue further. We apologize for the inconvenience but user experience and safety is our first priority"

Before Skype withdrew the ability for users to reset their passwords, the only protection for users was to change the email address connected with their Skype account to one which was not known by anybody else.

Microsoft-owned Skype has made the headlines for security reasons in the past. For instance, earlier this year it was accused of being slow to fix a flaw that could allow the gathering of information from Skype users, including a victim's city, country, internet provider and IP address.

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