New York Times Website Hacked

The New York Times website has gone offline for the second time this
month after what the company described as a "malicious external
attack".
On its Facebook page, the Times said it was working to fix the outage,
which appears to have started at 15:00 local time (19:00GMT) on
Tuesday.
A technical problem knocked NYTimes.com offline on 14 August, reports the BBC.
Analysts said evidence showed a group supporting Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad was behind Tuesday's attack.
The website was partially back online three hours later, although some
users still reported difficulties. During the outage the New York
Times published new articles on its Facebook page as well as a mirror
site.
Mark Frons, the company's chief information officer, warned New York
Times employees the attack was perpetrated by the Syrian Electronic
Army, which backs Assad, "or someone trying very hardto be them".
He cautioned staff to "be careful when sending e-mail communications
until this situation is resolved".
Security experts said there was enough evidence to link the hacking
group to the outage.
"The NYTimes.com domain is pointing at SyrianElec tronicArmy.com
which maps to an IP address in Russia, so it's clearly a malicious
attack," Ken Westin, a security researcher for Tripwire, an online
security company, told the BBC.
In a separate posting on Tuesday, the group also claimed
responsibility for hacking Twitter's administrative contact
information.
Recently, the Washington Post, CNN and Time magazine websites were
targeted in attacks attributed to supporters of the group.
"Media attacks seem to be escalating and moving away from annoying,
simple denial of service attacks and toward full domain compromise
which, if successful, puts millions of NYT website users at risk,"
said Westin.
As it did after the first New York Times outage, competitor Wall
Street Journal took down its pay wall and offered its content free to
all visitors.
In January, the New York Times said hackers had accessed its website
and stolen the passwords of 53 employees after it published a report
on the wealth of China Premier Wen Jiabao's family.