Wednesday, August 28, 2013



In a new attack by the infamous Syrian Electronic Army, the New York Times, Huffington Post UK, and Twitter were targeted by the group which has been declared as pro-Assad.

The attack was carried out by targeting the Australian company Melbourne IT on which this domain names are hosted.
The Syrian Electronic Army took responsibility for the attack on the three popular websites. “Media is going down…” the SEA warned before the websites went down.
New York Times, Twitter compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army
New York Times, SEA
The New York Times and Huffington Post websites were unavailable to users during the time of the attack while some users of the social networking site Twitter were unable to access their accounts.
The New York Times had to open a new website (www.nytco.com) to continue to run its news which were mainly about the chemical attack in Syria in which claims have been made that Assad’s government is responsible.
 A title on the new website was: “Not Easy to Hide a Chemical Attack, Experts Say”. It is believed that these websites are being targeted because of their coverage of events going on in the war ravaged Syria.
New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the loss of service was caused by a “malicious external attack” that affected its website and email. Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser claimed that viewing of images and photos were sporadically affected on the social network. Huffington Post has not commented on the attack though.
Melbourne IT spokesman Tony Smith claimed that the attackers came in directly by using correct usernames and passwords to access the accounts of the websites affected.
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,” Smith said in an email.
We will also review additional layers of security that we can add to our reseller accounts,” he added. Users on the New York Times were being redirected to sea.sy which is owned by the SEA.
Melbourne IT Chief technology officer Bruce Tonkin explained that attackers were unable to bring down twitter because the domain was protected by an optional secondary security feature which the New York Times have opted not to use.
If they had had the security option turned on, they wouldn’t have been affected,” he said.
This is not the first time the Syrian Electronic Army will be attacking popular websites as it attacked CNN, Time and the Washington Post through a third party site hosting contents on the sites less than two weeks ago. There are host of others apart from that.

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