The quickly-gaining-huge-publicity hacking group the Syrian Electronic Army has struck again, this time with a lot of waves made in the media: they managed to vandalize Marines.com with a message to the United States Marine Corps. In the message they call the Marines “brothers.”

The SEA is known as political hactivists and backers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Recently the SEA has been in the news with hacks against Twitter and vandalism of newspaper sites as well as a denial that Anonymous has successfully d0xed them.

The message proceeds with:

This is a message written by your brothers in the Syrian Army, who have been fighting Al-Qaeda for the last 3 years.

We understand your patriotism and love for your country so please understand our love for ours.

Obama is a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue Al-Qaeda insurgents.

Since the defacement, the Marines.com recruiting site has been fixed, but here is the image that was displayed by the hacking group.

No doubt this sort of activity gets attention, but similar to the activity of LulzSec in past years this is just the cyber-version of vandalism. Essentially sites such as Marines.com are just marketing and propaganda outlets for a particular organization and in this case all SEA did was rip down a poster put up by Marines.com and put up their own.

The media response to this and the subsequent huge proliferation of the SEA message is the best-end-outcome for this sort of activity.

The fact that this event occurred mere hours earlier and Marines.com is already fixed essentially washes away the graffiti; but since eyes are watching Syria and the US Marines websites is a notable target it makes it more than newsworthy. In a way, this sort of vandalism is perfect for spreading propaganda and effecting political discourse.

That said: the people who run high profile websites such as Marines.com should really think about spending more time on their basic security so that it’s more difficult to do something like this. A site such as the US Marines recruitment page may just be an electronic pamphlet for marketing the military, but it’s also the US government providing a springboard for hackers to do exactly this when there’s an exploitable flaw.