The New York Times site has reportedly faced outage for the second time in less than a month and officials believe that the pro-Assad hackitivist group Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is behind the attacks.
A ‘malicious external attack’ on the reseller of an Australian internet company, Melbourne IT resulted in the domain name of NYT getting attacked.
Melbourne IT spokesman Tony Smith said that the company acted to fix the problem and change the reseller”s hacked credentials (username and password) once they were aware of the attack.
NYT’s chief information officer said that the website outage was the result of a malicious external attack by the SEA or someone trying very hard to be them.
Meanwhile, NYT’s spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, tweeted that the issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack, based on an initial assessment.
Senior global threat analyst for FireEye, Kenneth Geers said that the NYT is the most popular news website in America with 30 million unique visitors each month and downing it could be a propaganda coup for SEA.
The report said that the outage was intermittent as some users did not complain having any issues accessing the site.
NYT had faced a major outage for several hours on August 14 and the site described it to be some ‘internal server problem’, the report added. (ANI)