Popular voice and messaging service Viber has been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, reports The Hacker News. The group has a history of hacking the Twitter accounts of the Associated Press, The Guardian, and other news sources.
Proof of today’s attack came in the form of a warning message on Viber’s support website (which has since been). The SEA claims that the messaging platform is spying and tracking its users, and it posted a screenshot of alleged evidence…
Here’s the image posted by THN:
Initially, it wasn’t clear how much information the SEA was able to snag, or what it planned to do with it. But in a statement to 9to5Mac, Viber said the attackers didn’t get beyond their support servers and that no sensitive user data was exposed.
“Today the Viber Support site was defaced after a Viber employee unfortunately fell victim to an email phishing attack. The phishing attack allowed access to two minor systems: a customer support panel and a support administration system. Information from one of these systems was posted on the defaced page.
It is very important to emphasize that no sensitive user data was exposed and that Viber’s databases were not “hacked”. Sensitive, private user information is kept in a secure system that cannot be accessed through this type of attack and is not part of our support system.
We take this incident very seriously and we are working right now to return the support site to full service for our users. Additionally, we want to assure all of our users that we are reviewing all of our policies to make sure that no such incident is repeated in the future.”
The attack comes at an interesting time, as hackers have been in the news quite a bit lately. Apple’s developer center, for instance, is still down after suffering a security breach last week. And the SEA’s claim that Viber tracks its users is also timely.
As of May of this year, Viber had around 200 million users, communicating in over 30 languages, around the globe.