"NEW YORK TIMES" WEB-SITE DOWN AFTER SUSPICIOUS HACKING
Due to a "malicious external attack" NEW YORK TIMES website has gone offline for the second time in this month.
It is planning to correct the dim-out, which seems to have started art 15:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday according to its FACEBOOK page. A technological problem made NYTimes.com to go offline on 14 August. But the shutdown now was due to the hacking of a group aiding the Syrian President BASHAR AL-ASSAD.
The website was moderately online after about 3 hours time, but some reported of difficulties. During the blackout ,the NY TIMES published its current articles in its Facebook page and its mirror site - - http://news.nytco.com/global/.
Mr. Mark Frons, the Chief Information Officer, cautioned the NYT staff that the attack was executed by the Syrian Electronic Army, which backs Mr. Assad, "or someone trying very hard to be them. Be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved". The security experts reported that they had enough evidence to connect the hacking group to the outage.
"The NYTimes.com website is pointing at SyrianElectronicArmy.com which connects 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. It was also reported in a separated account that the same group also claimed responsible for hacking into TWITTER'S administrative contact information.
MORE ATTACKS:
Lately, the Washington Post, CNN & Time Magazine websites were focused in attacks associated to supporters of the group. "Media attacks seem to be escalating and moving away from annoying, simple denial of service attacks and towards full domain compromise which, if successful, puts millions of NYT website users at risk," said Mr. Westin.
The competitor Wall Street Journal took down its pay wall and offered its content free to all visitors after the blackout of NYT. In January, the NYT had reported that its website was hacked and 53 employees pass words were stolen after it published a report on the wealth of CHINA PREMIER WEN JIABAO's family.
Michael Fey, chief technology officer at cyber security firm McAFEE, reported that as long as media organisations play a crucial role in reporting news and influencing debate, they will continue to be targets of cyber-attacks."Regardless of technology or tactics deployed we should expect to see more of these attacks," he said.
