The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a collective group of online hackers, is taking credit for exploiting The New York Times and Twitter.com websites.
The group disrupted traffic to the sites by taking control of Melbourne IT LTd., a registration services provider that controls ownership of both site’s URL addresses. Whois.com, a website that lists owners of domains (web addresses), at one point listed Listed the owner’s e-mail address as sea@sea.sy. While most visitors were simply unable to view the websites, there are reports of some being redirected to the Syrian group’s own websites and videos.
“The credentials of a Melbourne IT reseller (username and password) were used to access a reseller account on Melbourne IT’s systems,” Tony Smith, a spokesman for Melbourne IT Ltd., wrote in an email. The group used a technique call phishing to obtain the data needed to overtake the websites.
Twitter released a statement on their website saying, “At 20:49 UTC, our DNS provider experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter’s domains used for image serving, twimg.com. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted. By 22:29 UTC, the original domain record for twimg.com was restored. No Twitter user information was affected by this incident.”
“The New York Times Web site was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon following an attack on the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The attack also required employees of The Times to stop sending out sensitive e-mails,” an article in the Times said. “The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker collective that supports the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is believed to have attacked the sites or social media accounts of several prominent media organizations.”
New York Times employees have been asked to use caution when sending sensitive emails.
