Posted on 08/27/2013 9:33:28 PM PDT by TexGrill
SAN JOSE, California -- Readers who tried to click on the New York Times' website got nothing but error messages Tuesday afternoon in its second major disruption this month, with a group calling itself “The Syrian Electronic Army'' claiming responsibility.
Within minutes of the attack, the New York Times announced in a Twitter message that it would continue to publish the news. The site published two reports over two hours on chemical attacks in Syria. The news organization also set up an alternative news site, news.nytco.com.
The cause of Tuesday's service problems at the New York Times was unknown, but the behavior was consistent with a hacking attack that hijacks control of a site from its administrators.
Times officials did not immediately return phone and email messages for comment. In a Twitter message, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the cause was a ``malicious external attack.''
Two weeks ago, the Times' website suffered an outage that the company blamed on a server problem.
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. The SEA claims to have hacked the Washington Post, and Twitter feeds of several news organizations including The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera English and the BBC.
The group said in a Twitter message Tuesday that it also took over Twitter and Huffington Post U.K.
Twitter spokeswoman Christina Thiry said the company is looking into the claims.
Twitter and The New York Times were both hit by a technique known as ``DNS hijacking,'' according to Robert Masse, president of Montreal, Canada-based security startup Swift Identity.
(Excerpt) Read more at koreaherald.com ...
Only slightly different than the usual erroneous messages that the NY Slimes usually publishes.
Most of the NYT’s regular readers probably were more informed than usual Tuesday.
First the NYT is hacked, and then, OH NOES! Could the NSA be next?
It’s so... so... beautiful...
Now if the Syrian Army had a sense of humor, they’d just redirect the NYT to Rush Limbaugh’s home page instead.
That’s a good idea.
New York Times: “All the errors that fit to print.”
NY times site inaccessible? I never noticed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.