Syrian Electronic Army strikes again. Victim: Forbes. Reason: Hate

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacked into Forbes.com on Valentine's Day and claimed it got hold of more than a million user accounts. The attack was confirmed by Forbes, Sunday, which disclosed that some accounts may have been compromised.

The Syrian Electronic Army announced its latest adventure via Twitter and even threatened to sell the 1,071,963 names and passwords it was able to access. It later on retracted the threat but warned that it will publish the data online.

"Forbes.com hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army #SEA," tweeted the group that supports the reign of President Bashar al-Assad.

Technology blog Re/Code was among the first to report about hack and that Forbes had disabled some credentials for the site's blogging platform for contributors. Another source told the publication that some articles of Forbes were edited by members of the SEA.

"A person familiar with the situation, but who asked not to be named, confirmed to Re/code that sign-ins for Forbes' WordPress blogging system have been disabled for all outside contributors for now. The site accepts contributed articles from numerous outside writers in addition to stories penned by staff writers," the report read.

Forbes confirmed the information through its official Facebook Page.

"Forbes.com was targeted in a digital attack and our publishing platform was compromised. The email address for anyone registered with Forbes.com has been exposed Please be wary of emails that purport to come from Forbes, as the list of email addresses may be used in phishing attacks," stated Forbes. "The passwords were encrypted, but as a precaution, we will strongly encourage Forbes.com readers to change their passwords on our system once we make sign-on available again. We have notified law enforcement. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to the members of our community for this breach."

The hackers also claimed that it was able to access Twitter accounts such as @ForbesTech, @SamSharf, and @TheAlexKnapp. The @SamSharf account belongs to Forbes blogger Samantha Sharf who writes about markets and personal finance. The @TheAlexKnapp account belongs to Alex Knapp who works as social media editor and writer for Forbes.

"Many articles against the SEA were posted on Forbes, also their hate for Syria is very clear and flagrant in their articles," the group said in a statement sent to IBTimes UK.

The SEA Twitter account was busy through the weekend, taunting the website administrator of Forbes.

"We wonder why @Forbes admins could not stop us. Perhaps they were watching porn all day? #SEA," it tweeted.

"#Forbes users table(1,071,963 user-email-password) was dumped successfully, Anyone want to buy it?" it posted together with an image of Forbes' WordPress interface.

"We didn't publish the user table of Forbes to show off, but because they deserved to be embarrassed. #SEA," the group disclosed in another message.

"We have access to bigger user tables than Forbes one but Forbes has been so unethical that they deserved it. #SEA," said in another tweet.

The last tweet of SEA was addressed to the users of Forbes. "The user tables have been deleted, we are no longer publishing them. Please change your passwords if you have a login on Forbes.#SEA," it said.

Forbes warned its users to be wary of potential phishing emails and also sent out the message through different social media channels.

"We've been making adjustments to the site to protect online privacy and the editorial integrity of our content. We're looking into and monitoring the situation closely," said a spokesperson for Forbes on Sunday.

The Syrian Electronic Army has been hacking media outlets such as the BBC, the New York Times, and the Financial Times.

It has also defaced the social media accounts of CNN, hacked the blog of Microsoft, and took down Skype.