The frequency of attacks that the infamous Syrian Electronic Army carries out may correlate with the number of President Obama's public statements about Syria and its civil war.
Researchers at Recorded Future, a firm that analyzes publicly available data to assess and predict cyberattacks, call the link a "remarkable correlation."
See also: Syrian Electronic Army: If U.S. Attacks 'We Will Target All of It'
To put it simply, the more Obama talks about Syria, the more the Syrian hackers strike American media targets. It's a full-blown propaganda war.
In fact, when Obama discussed military action in retaliation against the alleged chemical attack in Damascus, the SEA ramped up its campaign against American media, hitting the New York Times, Twitter and others.
After the United States and Russia agreed on a diplomatic solution to the crisis, which requires Syria to destroy its chemical arsenal, the SEA backed off and remained relatively quiet.
"Since that chemical weapons agreement with the Russians to destroy the chemical weapons, the amount of talk about Syria has come down dramatically, and the amount of attacks has come down dramatically," Christopher Ahlberg, Recorded Future CEO and cofounder, told Mashable.
"These cyber-events happen in the contexts of whether is business or politics and military and so on," Ahlberg said. "We should understand this sort of attacks in a geopolitical context."
It's with this idea that Alhberg and his team analyzed the SEA's attacks and the volume of Obama's mentions and quotes on Syria.
"It struck us that, in modern study of warfare, there's this theory of opposing forces counter-interacting not just by shooting at each other but also through media/message interaction ," Alhberg said. "So, we looked at some angles of that and found this to be remarkably connected."
For Alhberg, the SEA's goal for its attacks seems similar to the actions rebels sometimes take during wartime, such as using a radio station "to stop presidents from talking." However, in this case, the radio station is the New York Times.
And Alhberg's team may be right on the money. Mashable asked a member of the SEA via email if the group agreed with this Obama-Syria cyberattack theory, to which our source simply replied: "Yes, that is true."
When asked to elaborate on the reasons behind this correlation, the hacker somewhat echoed Alhberg's remarks about the rebels taking the radio station as a way to disrupt communications from the president to its citizens.
"The reason is that Obama think[s] that Syria is one of America['s] states, but it's not, and he don't [sic] have any permission to decide the fate of Syria and Syrian people, and every speech for him, he talks about Syria like it is really one of America states."
The chart below, courtesy of Recorded Future, illustrates this theory. The vertical blue lines indicate an SEA attack, whereas the black line indicates, on a scale of one to four, the volume of references Obama has made about Syria, in public speeches or media interviews. Recorded Future plotted the data and connected the dots to turn them into a line. (Click to expand.)
Image: Somodevilla/Getty Images; Chart: Recorded Future