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Syrian Electronic Army claims hack on Truecaller

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The Syrian Electronic Army compromised the online service Truecaller on Tuesday, gaining access to the company’s database filled with phone numbers, emails and login credentials.

Hackers with the SEA claim to have access to data belonging to over a million users, including data on Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts belonging to Truecaller users.

Truecaller bills itself as one of the largest user-contributed phone directories on the internet, offering features such as number and name lookup and call filtering. The service is available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other phone operating systems.

On Tuesday, the SEA tweeted what appeared to be login credentials for a Truecaller database that had been compromised.

“Sorry Truecaller, we needed your database,” the SEA tweeted. “Thank you for it.”

“They have millions of Facebook/Twitter/Gmail accounts with access codes stored in their database,” a hacker who goes by the name Th3Pr0 told The Desk on Wednesday. Th3Pr0 wouldn’t say why the SEA wanted the directory.

Truecaller was briefly offline on Tuesday for “maintenance.” There was no mention of the hack on the Truecaller website as of Thursday morning.

The SEA is notable for hacking into Twitter accounts belonging to western media organizations. In a recent conversation with The Desk, Th3Pr0 said the organization was focusing on other activities, such as leaking sensitive information gathered from its hacking activities, adding that people had grown “bored” of the SEA compromising Twitter accounts.

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About the Author:

Matthew Keys

Matthew Keys covers the business of broadcast and streaming TV, radio broadcasting, social media, technology and telecommunications. A journalist for over 15 years, Matthew previously worked at Thomson Reuters, KGO-TV in San Francisco, KTXL in Sacramento and McNaughton Newspapers. He received 9 California Journalism Awards between 2018 and 2020, and is a member of IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors).
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