The Syrian Electronic Army hit the New York Times with another DNS-type (or domain name system) attack on Tuesday afternoon, as of right now the server is still unavailable.


RT reports that the Syrian Electronic Army has claimed access to a number of Twitter’s international domains shortly after bringing down the New York Times’ website. The attack was apparently made through Melbourne IT.

The SEA managed to alter both contact details and domain name servers of the New York Times and Twitter after reportedly having gained access to their registry records in Melbourne IT.

As a result of the attack the New York Times’ website has been disabled for the second time in under a month. The newspaper attributed the outage to a “malicious external attack” widely thought to have come from hackers affiliated with the Syrian Electronic Army.

“Many users are having difficulty accessing the New York Times online,” the paper wrote on its Facebook page. “We are working to fix the problem. Our initial assessment is the outage is most likely the result of a malicious external attack. In the meantime we are continuing to publish key news reports.”



The SEA also claimed in a series of tweets that it hijacked several domains for Twitter, redirected the social media traffic to its own server, rendering the site unstable.

John Bumgarner, a research director for the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a cybersecurity think tank told the Christian Science Monitor that, “What The New York Times is trying to do is get their property back,” “Their website address was essentially stolen, hijacked away from them – and now The New York Times is scrambling to get full ownership back.”