DAMASCUS, SYRIA – A group of pro-Syrian government hackers have reported that their electronic cyber-offensive against the Marine Corps has been prematurely concluded after its members became stranded on the login page for Marine Online.

Hacker AliBaba624 posted that the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which had earlier defaced the Marines’ recruiting website Marines.com, had spent the last twenty-three hours stuck on the website: unable to log on, navigate away, or answer the security questions required to change their password.

The jihacktivists as they call themselves, first broke onto Marines.com on Monday, posting pictures of sailors, soldiers, and airmen holding up signs claiming they didn’t join the military to fight, something most Marines already knew.

Normal visitors to Marines.com, consisting of six poolees and their families, were reportedly confused by the image and kept responding with posts like “God bless our troops” and “I loves my Marines.”

The SEA also left a message, part of which reads:

“This is a message from your brothers in Syria. You know: the sons of bitches who let all those jihadis smuggle IEDs and car bombs across our border into Iraq while you were there. We really hope you don’t bomb the crap out of us. P.S. Could you please ask whoever left Camp Gannon to come back and turn off Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl?’ It’s been playing on repeat ever since 2009 and is driving us nuts.”

The SEA planned to follow-up their cyber-vandalism with a coordinated attack on Marine Online, granting all Marines free leave in an effort to prevent an attack on Syria.

According to AliBaba624, the SEA was able to gain access to the website when they intercepted an e-mail from an irate Staff Sergeant with Marine Air Group 14 complaining about how he had to change his password every ten seconds, and unfortunately including his latest user name and password as evidence.

The SEA immediately sprang into action, although it took them six hours to navigate past the website’s many warnings, caveats, and updates before finally reaching its login page.

Once there, they attempted to break in with the Staff Sergeant’s credentials, only to discover that in the time elapsed, his password had been automatically changed three more times. While they were able to break his security question (“Favorite Military Service? Army National Guard”), they were unable to use the temporary password before five seconds elapsed, causing the system to automatically reset it.

Spokesmen at the Marine Corps Network Operations and Security Center (MCNOSC) said that they were aware of the attempted break-in and that even if the SEA had managed to breach Marine Online, they would have been unable to navigate its labyrinth of drop-down menus and dead links, all written in ancient Sumerian and hieroglyphics for security purposes.

MCNOSC intends to deter future attacks by e-mailing the SEA a picture of a laptop with a blindfold on it and that day’s newspaper, as well as a package with one of the keyboard’s less frequently used keys.

Gen. Keith Alexander from Cyber Command has confirmed that he spent the entire attack standing on his desk yelling until someone under the age of 30 made the Internet do what he wanted.

He vowed: “We will fight them on the firewalls, we will fight them on the DNS servers, we will fight in the FTP Protocols, we shall never surrender!”