New York Times and Twitter Attacked By Syrian Electronic Army

cold fjord writes with news that the NY Times website was disrupted by hackers Tuesday afternoon. "In an interview, Mr. Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as 'the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them.' The group attacked the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The Web site first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again." The Times wasn't the only site to be attacked: "Earlier today, a Twitter account allegedly belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Syrian-regime hacker collective, claimed to have taken over The New York Times website, Huffington Post UK's website and Twitter.com, by hacking into each of the site's registry accounts." The group was definitely able to change contact info for Twitter's domain. The Wall Street Journal notes that this is the same group that targeted media organizations a few months back. "When the SEA hacked the Twitter account of the Associated Press earlier this year, it posted a false headline to the account that said the White House had been attacked. The hoax caused U.S. stock markets to briefly lose $200 billion in value."

Comments

Re:NYT and Twitter attacked

[Adult film producer]

Not likely. The SEA is likely a small but very smart group of american/europeans. The whole Syrian thing is just a cover story.

Site Up, Just Misdirected

[guttentag]

Since the domain registrar is what was attacked, the site is still "up," just not reachable at the name nytimes.com. You can still access the site from its IP address: 170.149.168.130

Note that many links on the site will not work because they point to the nytimes.com domain. To read articles you'll have to copy the link, paste it into the location field and change "www.nytimes.com" to "170.149.168.130"... for example:

Clicking a link on their home page attempts to take you here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/business/media/hacking-attack-is-suspected-on-times-web-site.html
But that won't work, so you want to change it to:
http://170.149.168.130/2013/08/28/business/media/hacking-attack-is-suspected-on-times-web-site.html

The CSS is still pointing to nytimes.com, so the page will look funny, but at least you can read it.

Re:Suspiciously well timed...

[bill_mcgonigle]

I don't doubt the us gov is capable of false flag. But if they were to make a false flag attempt, why something so lame?

So Twitter was rated #1 by the EFF on resisting government warrant(less) data grabs and the NYT has recently started tipping over to the side of working with Snowden and Greenwald.

Other than that, I can't see any motivation to pick those two high-profile American targets.