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Washington Post Hacked, a Day After New York Times

Posted by timothy on from the paper-of-record dept.

barlevg writes "A day after the New York Times was brought down by a cyber attack, the Washington Post reported being hacked, with various news stories being redirected to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army. It's been speculated that this is the work of the same hacking syndicate that compromised both news organizations last year."

7 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. More information by barlevg · · Score: 4, Informative

    Submitter here.

    The NYT themselves claims they weren't hacked. This probably would have been a better choice for the first link than the humor column I originally chose. This non-attack-related downtime cause is elaborated on further in this article posted to zdnet (thx trb).

    On the other hand, Fox Business is also citing an unnamed source in saying it was a cyber attack. On the other hand, an unnamed source in a burlap sack is worth the sack.

    1. Re:More information by Qzukk · · Score: 4, Informative

      Y-you have three hands?! You're a Martian aren't you?

      Clearly he's a Motie.

      --
      If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
    2. Re:More information by OglinTatas · · Score: 4, Informative

      you beat me to it.
      The proper expression is
      On the one hand [one expression]
      on the other hand [other expression]
      on the gripping hand [gripping expression]

      It was this idiom in general usage that lead human authorities to believe that quarantine had failed.

      Niven: The Mote in God's Eye
      and The Gripping Hand

      --
      More music, fewer hits
  2. NYT not hacked. by Longstaff · · Score: 5, Informative

    Former NYT Digital, Core Infrastructure Engineer here. The outage yesterday was a problem with their load balancers caused by internal action. Stop reading the nonsense posted by Fox Business News.

    1. Re:NYT not hacked. by J053 · · Score: 1, Informative

      Yes - ignore FOX. I have the real scoop from Rush:

      RUSH: Folks, you can try to get to the New York Times story on the Clinton Global Initiative on the Web. I don't think you can. It's been taken down. Well, I don't know if it's been taken down or they just ended the access to it. But don't worry, I have enough of it for certain pull quotes. Oh, the whole website's inaccessible, so maybe the Times got hacked. Okay, Times got hacked. I thought just that one story pulled down. All right. It's obviously the Clinton story, the expose of the Clinton Global Initiative that's resulted in the Times website being hacked. The story is in the UK Telegraph, by Tim Stanley. "The New York Times Takes Down the Clinton Foundation. This Could Be Devastating for Bill and Hillary," is the headline. The lead is, "Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh?"

  3. Re:maintenance updates during the day ? by Longstaff · · Score: 4, Informative

    (former NYT Engineer) Some potentially disruptive maintenance that can be localized to a single team (say, storage maintenance) would be pushed to an overnight change window. However, emergency reachability for certain teams at NYT can problematic, so some (expected) low-impact work requiring multiple teams is done during the day. They have multiple data centers and everything is fully redundant, so updates can happen to service-drained components, be tested and then flipped once verified. Apparently that could not or did not happen here.

    FTR, the entire Digital Core Infrastructure team (responsible for Storage, Virtual Infrastructure, OS Mgmt, App Support and some networking) resigned approximately 3 months ago.

  4. Re:maintenance updates during the day ? by Longstaff · · Score: 3, Informative

    We left for separate opportunities; all within 6 weeks of each other. 100% related to management interference / incompetence.