Syrian hackers claim responsibility NYT website attack

The New York Times website was the subject of a "malicious external attack" on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.

The attack, which left the website unavailable to many users from about 3pm eastern time, was the second time the newspaper’s site had gone offline in the past two weeks.

Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the New York Times, said on Twitter that the the initial assessment was that the issue was "most likely result of malicious external attack" that the company was "working to fix". The site appeared to be still inaccessible early on Wednesday. The paper tweeted it was also publishing at news.nytco.com.

A Twitter account purporting to represent the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), an internet hacktivist group supportive of the Assad regime, claimed responsibility.

The problems began just after 3pm eastern time, and initially appeared to be intermittent. At 4:23pm, the New York Times posted on Twitter:

Three minutes later it declared that it would "continue to publish the news" and linked to a report on Syria which appeared to be hosted on a basic version of its site.

The newspaper’s website previously went down on Wednesday, August 14th. At the time Ms Murphy said it was caused by maintenance work and there was “no reason to believe that this was the result of a cyber-attack”.

It was also alleged on Tuesday that Twitter had been the victim of an attack by the SEA. Bryan Ries, a senior editor at Newsweek, tweeted that the social media website had "lost its domain to the Syrian Electronic Army".

Ries shared a link showing that the admin name and email for the domain name “twitter.com” had been changed to “SEA SEA” and “sea@sea.sy” respectively.

The SEA also claimed it “owned” Twitter’s domain, but there was no apparent disruption to Twitter’s service.

The site later released a statement confirming part of its operation used to view images had been affected but did not mention other attacks that appeared to have been carried out by the activists.

The SEA is a collection of computer hackers who support the Syrian president. Its relationship with Assad's government is the subject of debate. – (Guardian service)