Hackers disrupt NYTimes.com, Twitter
The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility. The Times offers a brief explanation on its home page and turns to Facebook for continued posting. Twitter users said their backgrounds changed.
The Syrian Electronic Army, loyal to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, has claimed responsibility for the attack, according to news reports.
The Times website, once it was restored, prominently featured this update on its home page:
To Our Readers
Our Web site was unavailable to users in the United States for a time on Tuesday. The disruption was the result of an external attack on our domain name registrar, and we are at work on fully restoring service. We regret if this has caused you any inconvenience.
During the downtime, the Times posted stories to a mobile website separate from NYTimes.com. It also offered updates on its Facebook page.
The hack to Twitter was a little more complicated.
The Syrian Electronic Army tweeted Tuesday that it had gained access to Twitter’s DNS servers, though it doesn’t appear the site itself was hacked. What was apparently hacked was Twitter’s image server. Multiple users said their background images had been changed to Syrian-themed images.
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