Skype's Twitter, Facebook, and blog hacked by Syrian Electronics Army demanding an end to spying
We're not even through the first day of 2014 and cyber attacks are back again. Earlier today, some person(s) breached Skype's security and hacked its Twitter account, Facebook page, and blog.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Syrian Electronic Army's New Year's Day hit on Skype extends a 2013 campaign that already took the Guardian's Twitter accounts in April, the Financial Times in May, and messaging service Viber in July. The group's method is consistent across all four: seize a trusted brand's public voice rather than its backend, then broadcast political messaging — here, demands for an end to spying.
What makes this instance notable is scale of attention: the story travelled same-day through Reuters, The Verge, Ars Technica, CNET, and others, forcing Skype to respond publicly within hours. Its own account message stressed that no user information was compromised — an admission that the perimeter breached was reputational, not customer data.
First-order effects
- Skype must triage a trust problem on day one of 2014: its Twitter, Facebook, and blog channels posted attacker content, and the company's immediate task is convincing hundreds of millions of users that account credentials — not call data — were the target.
- Every communications brand watching this now has to treat its social media logins as a live attack surface, since a single phished credential hands an adversary the most credible megaphone a company owns.
Second-order effects
- Rival messaging platforms targeted by the same group in 2013, such as Viber, face renewed scrutiny of whether their own social and support channels are hardened against the same playbook.
- Social networks hosting these hijacked channels come under pressure from enterprise customers to offer stronger authentication for brand accounts, because each successful takeover degrades the platform's value as a corporate channel.
Third-order effects
- If the group keeps converting brand takeovers into anti-surveillance headlines, Western consumer-tech firms may structurally separate who can publish socially from core admin credentials — treating social accounts as critical infrastructure rather than marketing tools.
- The pattern points toward hacktivism settling in as a persistent geopolitical irritant for US and UK media and communications companies, with each incident eroding public confidence in how those firms secure any credential tied to user trust.
The trend: Politically motivated groups are weaponizing hijacked corporate social accounts as their primary propaganda channel, turning brand credibility into the exploited asset rather than underlying user data.