New York Times, Twitter hacked, Syrian Electronic Army takes credit

New York Times, Twitter hacked, Syrian Electronic Army takes credit
28 Aug 2013

The Syrian Electronic Army.The New York Times, Twitter and others media websites became the latest American media organizations to succumb to hacking attacks, in another series of disruptions apparently caused by the shadowy group known as the Syrian Electronic Army.

The SEA, the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that has previously attacked media organizations that it considers hostile to the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages late on Tuesday.

Security experts said electronic records showed that NYTimes.com, the only site with an hours-long outage, redirected visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went dark.

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

The Huffington Post attack was limited to the blogging platform’s UK web address. Twitter said the hack led to availability issues for an hour and a half but that no user information was compromised.

The attacks came as the Obama administration considers taking action against the Syrian government, which has been locked for more than two years in an increasingly bloody struggle against rebels.

In August, hackers promoting the Syrian Electronic Army simultaneously targeted websites belonging to CNN, Time and the Washington Post by breaching a third party service used by those sites.

The Syrian Electronic Army, or SEA, managed to gain control of the sites by penetrating MelbourneIT, an Australian internet service provider that sells and manages domain names including Twitter.com and NYTimes.com.

Twitter’s inline image service remains out of action hours after the site’s domain name server (DNS) record was hacked, apparently by the hacker group Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), as part of a cyber-attack against the registrar for sites including the New York Times.

Images and some avatars posted to Twitter’s twimg.com domain are not appearing when viewed on the web or in Twitter applications because the domain where the pictures are posted, twimg.com, had its domain name details altered on Tuesday.

The New York Times is also affected by the hack, which was carried out against an Australian registrar, Melbourne IT, which separately confirmed that it had been the cause of the failure.

Sources:
Media companies including the New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post lost control of some of their websites after hackers supporting the Syrian government breached the Australian internet company that manages many major site addresses. Al Jazeera

The Washington Post
The hacking group has been responsible for earlier digital attacks on Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the Associated Press and The Washington Post. It was behind an incident that briefly redirected some readers to the group’s Web site when they were attempting to reach some articles on The Post’s Web site. More

Photograph:
The logo for the Syrian Electronic Army, which has been blamed for the hack on Twitter and the NY Times domains. Logo

News updates:

US Vice President Joe Biden

‘There is no doubt that Syria’s government was responsible for a recent chemical attack in Damascus, as Western allies ramped up rhetoric in preparation of possible military strikes against Syria’. Biden’s comments on Tuesday made him the highest-ranking US official to say the Syrian government was behind the alleged chemical weapons attack on August 21, that aid agencies said killed at least 355 people and injured more than 3,000.

Kerry: Syria gas attack a moral obscenity

US Secretary of State John Kerry has signalled his country’s intention to act on Syria, describing the use of chemical weapons as a “moral obscenity” and pinning the blame on the Syrian government. In a strongly worded and emotive statement on Monday, Kerry said that it was “undeniable” that chemical weapons killed hundreds of people last Wednesday near Damascus, adding that the Syrian government must be held accountable.

The statement came hours after a United Nations team visiting Syria was fired upon while they travelled to the attack site to begin investigations.”Let me be clear. The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable. And despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured, it is undeniable,” Kerry said.
Kerry: Syria gas attack a moral obscenity. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/2013826191025273764.html

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