The New York Times and Twitter are the latest victims of the hacking group Syrian Electronic Army. The newspaper's and social media's websites were hacked Aug. 27 and had their domain names edited by the cybercriminals, BBC reported. The Syrian Army, which supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, has taken responsibility for the most severe attack taken by the group.
The Times' website crashed around 3 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 27, USA Today reported. As of the morning of Aug. 28, The New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said the website was close to being fully restored.
"If someone is still having trouble accessing the site, it is most likely the result of their Internet service provider not having yet restored the proper domain name system (DNS) records," she said.
SEA got access to The Times and Twitter through Melbourne IT, a company based in Australia that specializes in domain name registration. Melbourne IT is the vendor for The Times domain name.
The SEA focused their efforts on editing the Times' and Twitter's domain name system, or DNS, information, which is used to direct web traffic to a specific server. The hackers changed the DNC details so Internet users trying to access NYtimes.com would be routed to a website hosted by the SEA, BBC reported.
Before The New York Times' website was restored, The Times was forced to send their news through another website: News.nytco.com, USA Today reported. Marc Frons, chief information officer for The New York Times Co. warned Times employees to be careful with sending email communications this week due to the data privacy and security risks.
SEA targeted Twitter's twimg.com website, which is a separate domain on which the social media network stores image data and styling code. The attack disrupted the site and caused many Twitter pages to display incorrectly, BBC reported.
The SEA posted this Tweet: "Hi @Twitter," the group said in one tweet, "look at your domain, its owned by #SEA :)" to announce it had hacked the website.
Melbourne IT responded to the hacking attack, BBC reported.
"We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law enforcement bodies," the company said.
Previous SEA Attacks
The SEA has also hacked The Washington Post's website, as well as those of CNN and Time, earlier this month, USA Today reported. In those events, the SEA accessed the Internet service of Outbrain, a content recommendation company whose software widget is embedded into the news sources' websites.
