Following a damaging attack on their websites yesterday, both The New York Times website and Twitter are still suffering some technical problems.
The newspaper and social network were hit hard by an extremist group from Syria on Tuesday. The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), supporters of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The origin of the attack centered around accessing the site's domain names and maliciously editing them to navigate users away from the Times and Twitter and to a webpage sponsored by the SEA.
In simpler terms, as explained by BBC News, sites are accessed by familiar and intuitive addresses like HNGN.com or BBC.com rather than long complicated IP addresses. Both Twitter and the Times registered their domain names with a company called Melbourne. In a statement the company said that the hackers somehow obtained the reseller's log-in credentials and were thus able to walk through the "front door" in order to carry out the attack.
"If you've got a valid user name and password," the chief executive, Theo Hnarakis told ABC Australia. "The assumption from our systems is that you are the authorized owner and user of that domain name."
Melbourne IT is currently investigating a way to add additional layers of security to it's system. Meanwhile both the Times and Twitter are telling customers that no personal information was at risk because of the attack.
For Twitter, this meant its domain to store image data as well as styling code, twimg.com, was hit. The SEA took credit for the attack on its own Twitter account writing "Hi @Twitter, look at your domain, its owned by #SEA."
In recent months, according to the BBC, the attackers have been targeting major media companies like The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Huffington Post, CNN and BBC. However, this was the first use of a Domain Name System attack that was able to cause longer lasting damage.