New York Times website taken down by 'malicious external attack' as Syrian Electronic Army claims responsibility
Readers who tried to click on the New York Times' website got nothing but error messages for an estimated seven hours on Tuesday, with the ‘Syrian Electronic Army’ - a group of hackers who support President Bahar al-Assad of Syria - claiming responsibility.
On the same day that it ran an opinion piece entitled ‘Bomb Syria, even if it is illegal’, readers who tried to visit the website got nothing but error messages.
The website went down at around 3pm ET and wasn't working properly again until after 10pm, although within minutes of the attack an alternative site was posting stories about chemical attacks in Syria.
The New York Times website was inaccessible Tuesday afternoon with the 'Syrian Electronic Army' claiming responsibility
The cause was unknown, but the behavior was consistent with a hacking attack that hijacks control of a site from its administrators.
In a statement to employees, the company's chief information officer Marc Frons said the incident was 'the result of a malicious external attack by the Syrian Electronic Army or someone trying very hard to be them.'
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Employees were also advised to 'be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved.'
In the opinion piece, Ian Hurd, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern, wrote that intervention was necessary in Syria because of the government’s ‘constructive noncompliance’ over the use of chemical weapons.
Secretary of State John Kerry, left, announced on Monday that the U.S. government would be retaliating - in some form - against Bashar al-Assad's, right, regime in Syria for using chemical weapons on citizens
Visitors to the NYTimes.com website are currently receiving an error message instead of the homepage after the site was hacked
The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working on fully restoring the site.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 27, 2013
Two weeks ago, the Times' website suffered an outage that the company blamed on a server problem.
The Syrian Electronic Army has taken credit for a string of web attacks on media targets it sees as sympathetic to Syria's rebels.
The group said in a Twitter message on Tuesday that it also took over Twitter and Huffington Post U.K.
Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser said viewing of images and photos were sporadically affected.
The Syrian Electronic Army has, in recent months, taken credit for Web attacks on media targets that it sees as sympathetic to Syria's rebels, including prior attacks at the New York Times, along with the Washington Post, Agence France-Press, 60 Minutes, CBS News, National Public Radio, The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera English and the BBC.
The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers who support President Bahar al-Assad of Syria and have taken down a number of news sites including the Telegraph and the Onion
Michael Fey, a chief technology officer at Santa Clara, Calif. based cybersecurity firm McAfee, said on Tuesday that as long as media organizations play a critical role as influencers and critics, they will continue to be targets of cyber-attacks.
He said the battle tactics are broad, from denial of service attacks, to targeted attacks using social engineering and to deploying information-gathering Trojans.
‘Regardless of technology or tactics deployed, we should expect to see more of these attacks,’ he said.
The hack comes in the wake of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement that the U.S. government would be retaliating - in some form - against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria for using chemical weapons on citizens.
Tuesday’s Times homepage featured a video of Kerry’s announcement.
FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer at the Washington D.C. headquarters said the agency has no comment on the attack.
Hi @Twitter, look at your domain, its owned by #SEA :) http://t.co/ZMfpo1t3oG pic.twitter.com/ck7brWtUhK
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) August 27, 2013
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