War is a normal thing, Miley Cyrus dancing is not

Unfortunately, after so many thousands of years of fighting and bloodshed, we as humans are proving that we are far from getting more mature each day, by lusting for more blood on every occasion. We love to be categorized by nation, language, skin color and religion and fight with each other. After what I have seen in the last six months I have no more hope for humankind. We are preparing for yet another war in the Middle East. Another one of our neighbors will be completely destroyed. 

The scenario is similar, the U.S. and the U.K. will hit Syrian bases, then probably there is going to be a land attack. 

However, this time there might be a virtual part to this very familiar story. 

Yesterday, the Washington Post was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). They only got control of the main page via the domain registration service. Most probably they couldn’t reach the internal documentation. 

According to Andrea Patterson of the Washington Post, some of the SEA’s early activity included spamming pages with pro-Assad comments, but activity later escalated to large scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Those attacks work by jamming websites with too many traffic requests and making normal visitors unable to access the page. The group also battled online with hacker collective Anonymous, who once hacked the website of the Syrian Ministry of Defense.

Recently, the SEA has been hacking social media accounts and websites associated with major news or human rights organizations. National Public Radio (NPR), the Associated Press (AP), Human Rights Watch (HRW), al-Jazeera, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have all been victims of the SEA. When they hacked the AP’s Twitter handle to say the White House had been bombed, and President Obama had been injured, the stock market briefly nosedived by $136 billion.

The SEA cannot be a match to the U.S.’s hacker army, but it can cause a disturbance that American citizens didn’t feel before. 

According to a blog post by Michael Lofti (http://benswann.com/how-america-reacted-miley-cyrus-vs-syria/), the American public cared about Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance much, much more than the imminent war with Syria. Miley Cyrus was searched intensively, while there were only a few searches for information related to Syria. 

War seems to be a normal thing for Americans, while Miley Cyrus dancing is a shocking event. The Syrian army may not be able to withstand American and British might, but maybe they can create some dissent among the U.S. public by hacking. Therefore, I guess that we will see more of the SEA, or Chinese and Russian hackers posed as the SEA, in the coming days.