​The Syrian Electronic Army Put Annoying Pop-Ups on a Ton of Websites

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group of pro-Assad hackers, has yet again claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on numerous high-profile sites including The Independent, the CBC, and Forbes.

The attack, as suggested by a screenshot posted by the SEA on their Twitter account and confirmed by reports, consisted of exploiting the DNS entry at GoDaddy through Gigya, a popular analytics platform, which redirected users to SEA-controlled pages and subjected them to pop-ups informing them that they'd been "hacked."

The attack follows a familiar template: the SEA often exploits weaknesses in third party services to attack sites with enough traffic to garner some attention. In June, the SEA redirected visitors of the Reuters site to an SEA-controlled page by corrupting web ads provided by Taboola, a popular online advertising platform.

According to a statement Gigya CEO Patrick Sayler provided to the CBC, no user information was compromised and the issue has been corrected with GoDaddy.

"To be absolutely clear: neither Gigya's platform itself nor any user, administrator or operational data has been compromised and was never at risk of being compromised," Sayler told the CBC.

The SEA is owning the relative harmlessness of their attack by claiming the status of "good guys." A tweet posted by the group directs users to the download page for NoScript, a Firefox extension that only allows trusted sites to run Java and Flash scripts, "in case the bad guys copy us."

The attack's message, according to the SEA's Twitter account, is directed at the press. "Please don't pretend #ISIS are civilians," it said addressing western media outlets.

The SEA's message comes in the wake of a recent report by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that claims 52 civilians have been killed in Syria by US-led airstrikes since the start of the campaign in September. The increasingly conflated borders of Syria and Iraq are a known hub for ISIS forces, who have captured large swaths of the region.

Raqqa, acts as the center of what militants call the Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and is subject to frequent bombings by US-led coalition forces and the Assad regime itself, the latter of which killed at least 36 civilians in a series of air strikes on Tuesday.

The SEA's stated mission is to attack sites that spread what they believe to be false information about the Syrian civil war, which has been raging for several years and has so far claimed nearly 200,000 lives according to the UN.