New York Times and Twitter Reportedly Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

The New York Times’ website is having a rough month. Only a couple weeks after maintenance troubles caused several hours of downtime, the iconic paper has again experienced a major disruption. This time, the outage is clearly the result of an attack.

The New York Times and Twitter were hacked by a group calling itself the S.E.A.

The hacker group known as SyrianElectronicArmy claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as attacks on Twitter and The Huffington Post UK. The attack took place Tuesday afternoon, knocking out the site for readers. As a precaution, The New York Times limited email use for its staff and journalists. In the case of each website, the hacker changed the DNS information to reflect its victory. The New York Times posted an article on the hack, noting that its domain name registrar, Melbourne IT, was attacked by S.E.A. The hacker group has successfully hacked several websites in the U.S., including the The Washington Post’s site earlier this month. The move from attacking sites directly to attacking their domain registrars is worrisome – websites can’t control the security of these services.