The pro-Assad group Syrian Electronic Army claims it hacked the Twitter and Facebook accounts of U.S. President Barack Obama.

In an exclusive email to Mashable sent from an account believed to belong to the SEA on Monday, the group notified us of the hack, but would not provide details about how it accomplished it. It appears the SEA did not actually access Obama's social media accounts, but altered the links in the posts by tampering with the URL shortener service for BarackObama.com.

"All the the links that Barack Obama account tweeted it and post it on Facebook was redirected to a video showing the truth about Syria," an SEA spokesperson wrote.

The president primarily used BarackObama.com during his presidential campaign's in 2008 and 2012. The screenshots below show the altered links from Obama's verified Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The SEA has become infamous over the past few months for its high-profile attacks on media organizations it deems to be opponents of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The altered links in Obama's profile lead to a 24-minute video titled "Syria facing terrorism." Be warned, however: The video contains graphic violence.

The group appears to have had some form of access to BarackObama.com since Sunday night, when a page on the site redirected to a page that read "Hacked by SEA," as first reported by The Blaze.

In a past interview via the same email address, supposed members of the SEA provided us with information about their goals and past attacks.

The links had not been fixed at time of writing, around 1:20 p.m. ET.

UPDATE: Oct. 28, 1:30 p.m. ET

In a follow-up email, the SEA provided screenshots that show how it altered the links in Obama's social media posts. The group appears to have hacked the email address of Suzanne Snurpus, one of the administrators of BarackObama.com, and it gained access to a control panel for the site.

This was apparently accomplished through Blue State Digital (BSD), a company that helped the Obama campaign with digital strategy and services in 2008 and 2012.

Correction: The above screenshot shows a dashboard from ShortSwitch, a URL shortener, not Blue State Digital.

Both the White House and Snurpus have not yet replied to our inquiries. Some of the broken links appear to have been fixed at this time, while others still redirect to the video.

UPDATE: Oct. 28, 2 p.m. ET

All of the links on Obama's Facebook and Twitter pages appear to have been fixed.

UPDATE: Oct. 28, 2:30 p.m. ET

The SEA confirmed in an email that the attack on Obama's social media links is now finished.

UPDATE: Oct. 28, 3:40 p.m. ET

It took eight hacked email accounts to pull of this attack, according to the person operating the SEA email address. From screenshots sent by the SEA, it appears the group used information from the hacked email accounts to gain access to two digital service provides — Blue State Digital and URL shortener ShortSwitch — which is how the SEA managed to set up the redirect.

The supposed SEA spokesperson said that gaining access to ShortSwitch was the key to the attack.

"As you might expect all the necessary information was in their emails," the spokesperson wrote. "They didn't even enabled two-step verification."

Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/GettyImages