Syrian Electronic Army implicated in Twitter, New York Times attacks

Syrian Electronic Army implicated in Twitter, New York Times attacks: The Syrian Electronic Army apparently took control over the Twitter.com Web site address record Tuesday, the hacker group’s latest attack on high-profile Internet sites.

The Twitter.com whois record, which lists the owner of the Web address names called domains, listed the owner’s e-mail address as sea@sea.sy. The site continued to function, however.

The New York Times’ Web site went down on Tuesday afternoon, and the SEA is a suspect there, too. “Our initial assessment is that this is most likely the result of a malicious external attack,” the Times said in a statement on Facebook. The Syrian Electronic Army is a suspect: Gawker published a screenshot of the newspaper’s site that said, simply, “Hacked by SEA.”

In an article, The New York Times said the problem occurred because of an attack on the domain name registrar it uses to keep control over the nytimes.com name.

“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,” the story 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.”