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, 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.
Posts
New York Times, Twitter compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army