Times site affected by hacking attack

New York: The New York Times website was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon after an online attack on the company's domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The attack also forced employees of The Times to take care in sending emails.

Marc Frons, chief information officer for The New York Times Co., issued a statement at 4:20 p.m. warning employees that the disruption - which appeared to still be affecting the website well into the evening - was "the result of a malicious external attack." He advised employees to "be careful when sending email communications until this situation is resolved."

In an interview, Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as "the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them."

The website first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again. Shortly after 6 p.m., Frons said that "we believe that we are on the road to fixing the problem."

The Syrian Electronic Army is made up of hackers who support President Bashar Assad of Syria. Matt Johansen, head of the Threat Research Center at White Hat Security, posted on Twitter that he was directed to a Syrian Web domain when he tried to access The Times' website.

The SEA first emerged in May 2011, during the first Syrian uprisings, when they started attacking a wide array of media outlets and nonprofits and spamming popular Facebook pages like President Barack Obama's and Oprah Winfrey's with pro-Assad comments. Their goal, they said, was to offer a pro-government counter narrative to media coverage of Syria.

The group has consistently denied ties to the Assad government and has said it does not target Syrian dissidents, but security researchers and Syrian rebels are not convinced. They say the group is the outward-facing campaign of a much quieter surveillance campaign targeting Syrian dissidents and are quick to point out that Assad once referred to the SEA as "a real army in a virtual reality."

Until now, The Times has been spared from being hacked by the SEA, which has successfully disrupted the Web operations of news organizations including The Financial Times.

On Aug. 15, the group attacked The Washington Post's website through a third-party service provided by a company called Outbrain. At the time, the SEA also tried to hack CNN. Some information security experts said the group also appeared to be ready to attack The New York Times website that day. (Just a day earlier, on Aug. 14, The Times' website was down for several hours. The Times cited technical problems and said there was no indication the site was hacked.)

In a post on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, the SEA also said it had hacked the administrative contact information for Twitter's domain name registry records. According to the Whois.com lookup service, the Syrian Electronic Army was listed on the entries for Twitter's administrative name, technical name and email address.

Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, said the social network was "looking into" the Syrian Electronic Army's claim that it had taken control of a Twitter domain.

Frons said the attacks Tuesday on Twitter and The New York Times required significantly more skill than the string of SEA attacks on media outlets earlier this year, when the group attacked Twitter accounts for dozens of outlets ranging from The Guardian to The Associated Press. Those attacks caused the stock market to plunge after the group planted false tales of explosions at the White House.

"In terms of the sophistication of the attack, this is a big deal," said Frons. "It's sort of like breaking into the local savings and loan versus breaking into Fort Knox. A domain registrar should have extremely tight security because they are holding the security to hundreds if not thousands of websites."