New York Times, Twitter Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army

A Chrome error message for nytimes.com on August 28, 2013

Twitter Inc. and The New York Times were hit with cyber attacks on Tuesday by the Syrian Electronic Army, rendering at least parts of their sites inaccessible, the company that controls the data said

The Syrian group disrupted traffic to the websites by hacking on Tuesday into registration-services provider Melbourne IT Ltd., which handles the online addresses of nytimes.com and twitter.co.uk, according to Tony Smith, a spokesman for the Melbourne-based company. The Times was still inaccessible for some users on Wednesday, and the newspaper instructed readers to go to an alternate site to read its articles.

Within minutes of the attack, the New York Times announced in a Twitter message that it would continue to publish news. The company quickly set up alternative websites, posting stories about chemical attacks in Syria. “Not Easy to Hide a Chemical Attack, Experts Say,” was the headline of one.

New York Times Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army

New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted on Tuesday that the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack," based on an initial assessment.

“Our Web site was unavailable to users in the United States for a time on Tuesday,” the New York Times said in a statement. “The disruption was the result of an external attack on our domain name registrar, and we are at work on fully restoring service.”

This is the second time the Times has experienced problems with its website in two weeks. On August 14, the site was down for several hours, an outage likely related to a scheduled maintenance update that occurred within seconds of the website's going down.

A Twitter user claiming to represent the Syrian Electronic Army posted images of a set of altered domain registrations for the Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post’s U.K. site. The Times data listed a Syrian e-mail address as the administrator’s contact information.

Twitter Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army

On its website, Twitter said its domain registration provider “experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified,” including the twimg.com domain it uses to host images. The original domain record for that site has since been restored, and no user information was affected, it said. While Twitter’s site operated normally, twitter.co.uk was inaccessible for some users.

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Write by: RC - Wednesday, August 28, 2013