LOS ANGELES, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- Syrian hackers behind outages on U.S. news websites will likely increase activity if the U.S. military launches strikes on Syria, a cybersecurity expert says.
The Syrian Electronic Army, which supports the regime of President Bashar Assad, attempts to keep people from reading what it views as negative information by launching hacking attacks on news and social media sites, said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for CrowdStrike, an Internet security firm in Irvine, Calif.
"They're gearing up to continue the campaign, and if the hammer starts to come down on the current regime, they're going to start desperately trying to provide positive messaging and negatively impact those speaking badly about the regime," Meyers told the Los Angeles Times.
The group is suspected of hacking attacks against the websites of the New York Times, the Huffington Post, other news organizations and social networking entities such as Twitter.
"Their big initiative is to impact dialogue and change messaging to have a pro-Syrian slant to it," Meyers said. "Anything they can do to put up a pro-Syrian slant ... or negatively impact an anti-Syrian slant, they do."
