Syrian Electronic Army takes down New York Times website

[n2doc]

Source: RT

The New York Times’ website has been disabled for the second time in under a month, with the newspaper attributing 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, a shadowy group of hackers sympathetic to the Syria’s President Bashar Assad, has launched cyber-attacks on a number of media outlets in recent months including the associated Press’ Twitter feed, which falsely reported that US President Barack Obama was injured in an attack on the White House.

The Times’ page was last unavailable on August 14, although the several-hour outage was later blamed on “a failure during regular maintenance.”

more

http://rt.com/news/sea-hack-nyt-site-twitter-077/

Read more: http://rt.com/news/sea-hack-nyt-site-twitter-077/

[Harmony Blue]

1. The Syrian Electronic Army

has no reason to attack the NYT. Allegedly they have turned against the Syrian regime.

And here comes the misinformation.

[David__77]

11. Syrian Electronic Army is like "anonymous."

It's composed of lots of Syrian patriots, some for Assad, a few against. But they are all united against the terrorists supported by the US.

[Harmony Blue]

12. Yeah that makes a lot more sense

if you put all the pieces together.

[Alamuti Lotus]

2. Couldn't happen to a nicer pack of drooling vultures and jackals

There were rumours being spread by certain opposition "activists" (love those euphemisms) that the Syrian Electronic Army had turned on the government and now can't wait for the foreign armies to invade now, beating those <<insert type of drum used by the keyboard brigade here>&gt **) to war like the more obedient chumps are these days. Apparently...not. It's good to see that the rumours from those "activists" (again, love the euphemistic rape of language) are as truthful as everything else that is said about the war they're dying to expand.


(**)--if bongos are the stereotypical drum of those goddamn peacenik extremists ("peace purists", according to: not Free Republic, not Lindsey Graham, but prominent liberal democrats on this very site), what is the preferred drum for the chickenhawks and the keyboard brigade? It has to be something that is easy to march around with. The soldiers they want to send off to kill and die do a lot of marching around, so that's a concern. A snare works, and it makes a terrifying sound that sounds like guns being fired..."beating that snare drum to war" just doesn't have the right ring to it, though. Drawing board, watch this space.

[defacto7]

3. It's more than their page that's been hacked

They took over their DNS. That's a bit more serious.

Also Huff post and Twitter... DNS takeover.

[Blue_Tires]

4. Syria, the country who famously has to outsource/steal its own hacking?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/07/surveillance-technology-repressive-regimes

http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_spy_who_came_in_from_the_c.php?page=1

[DisgustipatedinCA]

5. Odd. I'd think that Syrians loyal to Assad wouldn't want to attack a paper in a country where the

...war approval rating is at 9%.

This hack may raise that 9% up to 11 or 12%. These "Syrian hackers" sure picked an odd time to shoot themselves in the foot, don't you think?

[AverageJoe90]

7. They probably just got cocky, that's all. n/t

[David__77]

10. NYT is part of that 9%, that's why.

...

[Sunlei]

6. all those 99 cent payers must be outraged

[yurbud]

8. this PR bullshit is just embarrassing.

don't they try these out of focus groups to see if they pass the laugh test before they deploy them?

[lcordero2]

9. another lie

nobody will miss the NY times anyway so it wasn't important.

[Skidmore]

13. Kicking this because Rachel Maddow did a segment on

the hacking of this group this evening. I noted in a search on DU that there was an article about their hacking way back at the beginning of June. Don't think this should be dismissed since one of the stunts they pulled was the one in which it was communicated that some harm had come to President Obama at the WH and the stock markets started tanking.