The Syrian Electronic Army (or SEA) has been a thorn in the side of the online security community for months now and has been implicated in numerous hacks involving mostly cybervandalism of Twitter accounts and journal websites such as the New York Times and Huffington Post. Recently, cells of the hacking collective Anonymous have geared themselves into action due to the obvious turf-war rivalry of another hacking group rolling around in their territory and began to counterhack SEA—including striking back.

For some background on the SEA and who they are, the best source of information is John Casaretto’s post bout their presence: web, social media, and hacking. The SEA appears to be much more than the standard body of malicious hackers—as a group it’s definitely highly political hactivist that uses the means of cybervandalism to make a point that appears to be extremely aligned with Syria. This is especially notable due to President of the United States, Barak Obama, giving a speech suggesting that the US might become involved in a war against that West Asian country.

Now news is coming out about SEA denying that their members have been d0xed (or outed) by Anonymous members. It would appear that several gigabytes of data have been leaked about the organization, including information about some of their more prolific hackers such as The Pro—who is thought to have been identified as Hatem Deeb.

According to a French website (warning quite explicit), Anonymous #opSyria has claimed numerous pictures and identification for The Pro—and, in usual fashion, it includes a lot of explicit pictures. It’s hard to tell that this information has anything to do with the SEA, but it has distinct elements that connect it to pro-Syria hackers of some sort. Brian Krebs also got into the action in a dissection post claiming to identify a major member of SEA as named “Mohammed from Damascus” or Mohammed Osman.

A spokesperson from the SEA told TechWeek that Deeb is not The Pro, and also said that they said Ali Farha, another name previously linked to the group, “is a press guy”.  SEA spokespeople have also denied Kreb’s discovery that there is any Mohammad Osman in a prominent position in the organization.

“The database dump could be for any pro-Syria site,” the spokesperson added. “We want to say, that all SEA members are using fake names and they don’t post their pictures and use their real name.”

Of course, it should be noted that even TechWeek is only speaking to “spokespeople” who themselves don’t claim to be part of the Syrian Electronic Army or hackers themselves, and it’s hard to vet the information coming from them.

The Future of SEA vs Anonymous vs the media

Hackers against hackers is going to be an extremely common element of the cybervaldanism and even hacktivist culture. Since hackers themselves are people they have nationality and some of them a sense of patriotism; but what really might tie them together is a strong sense of competitive blood-fever. As I said above, there are more than likely cells of Anonymous who see the activity of organizations such as SEA as treading in their territory and might even see d0xing SEA “for the lulz” as a worthy activity.

The Syrian Electronic Army has proven that they’re capable of playing with the big boys in the arena of vandalism—which is what most high media publicity hacks are nowadays—but they haven’t done anything on the level of state-backed hackers. They behave a lot like a very rowdy and immature propaganda outlet that also has the ability to hijack lines of communication.

We can probably expect more information to come out about SEA as they continue to brag about their exploits.