New York Times and Twitter Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army

The Guardian: Australian web hosting company Melbourne IT has been targeted in a major attack by hackers that disrupted the New York Times website and Twitter.

The Syrian Electronic Army, which supports the Assad regime in Syria, has claimed responsibility for the denial of service, or DNS, attack, which took down the New York Times website for several hours last night. The SEA also claimed that it "owned" Twitter's domain. Twitter and the New York Times both use Melbourne IT as a domain name registrar.

Theo Hnarakis, the chief executive of Melbourne IT, said that the perpetrators had gained access to the company's systems via a valid user name and password.

"One of our resellers in the US was targeted and we are currently investigating how this could have happened," he said. "We are working with a variety of parties to trace the relevant ISP to see who was responsible for this.

"We have rectified this as best we can. I wish I could say how this occurred but I don't want to speculate at this stage. We will update people on this. Given there is a vulnerability, we need to make sure this doesn't happen again. But there is no evidence that the systems had been hacked at this stage."

Four other lesser known websites were also affected, Hnarakis said. Melbourne IT holds registrations for a raft of major websites.

The group has also previously attacked the Guardian.

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