This is what happened with the Syrian Electronic Army hack

A group purporting to be the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad hacking group, briefly took down a series of popular websites today. Users visiting links to sites including i100 and the Independent were greeted with a message saying "you've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)".

They were then redirected to a page with a version of the Syrian Electronic Army's logo.

The hack hit websites using the popular Gigya comment platform. Hackers attempted to exploit the DNS entry — which translates URLs such as i100.independent.co.uk into directions to the site — at GoDaddy, the domain name group.

This was not Gigya itself and it does not mean user data was in jeopardy.

"Some calls to Gigya domains were redirected to the hackers site or showed a hacking message to end users", the company said. "It might take some time until the changes propagate to all users. We have worked with GoDaddy to resolve the issue and the redirection was removed."

Other than the Independent and i100, these are the sites where users reported problems on Twitter.

Chicago Tribute

CNBC

CBC

PC World

Forbes

Telegraph

Time Out

Evening Standard

Toulouse FC

National Geographic

NBC

NHL

OK Magazine

The events are still being investigated but there is currently no suggestion that users' computers are at any risk.

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