NYT, Twitter and HuffPo Attacked by Syrian Electronic Army
By Danny Yadron, Shira Ovide and William Launder.
A pro-Syrian government group appeared to attack more than 10 websites, including Twitter, the New York TimesNYT -2.93% and HuffingtonPost.com, said security researchers citing digital evidence.
The attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, come as the U.S. is considering action against Syria. In the past, the group has taken action against media organizations and websites it believes are sympathetic to Syrian rebels.
The websites, including the Huffington Post’s U.K. website, appeared to be compromised Tuesday by the group, said a security researcher who had seen digital evidence. HuffingtonPost confirmed the attack and said there was a “minimal disruption of service.”
The hackers, meantime, repeatedly claimed they had taken over Twitter’s Internet address, though they appeared to be unsuccessful.
The social media site never appeared to lose service. (The hackers used their own Twitter account to claim they had hacked the social-media website.)
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Photo Credit: Adam Jeffery
By Eamon Javers and Cadie Thompson.
The New York Times said its website has been taken down, in what was likely an external malicious attack Tuesday.
Eileen Murphy, VP of corporate communications, initially reported the outage via Twitter.
While the Times was down, Twitter also experienced some hiccups on its website. A Twitter account for the group of hackers called the Syrian Electronic Army claimed that it had attacked the social media website and changed the ownership listing of Twitter’s domain name registration.The same account later posted to Twitter that it had also taken over the registrations for the Times website and for the Huffington Post UK domain.
Twitter told CNBC that it was investigating the issue.
Twitter later issued a status update saying that its Domain Name System (DNS) provider had “experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter’s domains used for image serving, twimg.com.” As a result, “Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted.”
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