NYTimes site inaccessible, second disruption in August

Announces in a Twitter message that it will continue to publish the news

Readers who tried to click on the New York Times' website got nothing but error messages in its second major disruption this month, with a group calling itself "The Syrian Electronic Army" claiming responsibility.

Within minutes of the attack on Tuesday afternoon, the New York Times announced in a Twitter message that it would continue to publish the news.

The site published two reports over two hours on chemical attacks in Syria. The news organisation also set up an alternative news site, news.Nytco.Com.

The cause of yesterday's service problems at the New York Times was unknown, but the behaviour was consistent with a hacking attack that hijacks control of a site from its administrators.

Times officials did not immediately return phone and email messages for comment. In a Twitter message, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the cause was a "malicious external attack."

Two weeks ago, the Times' website suffered an outage that the company blamed on a server problem.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has, in recent months, taken credit for Web attacks on media targets that it sees as sympathetic to Syria's rebels.

The SEA claims to have hacked the Washington Post, and Twitter feeds of several news organisations including The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera English and the BBC.

The group said in a Twitter message yesterday that it also took over Twitter and Huffington Post UK.

Twitter spokeswoman Christina Thiry said the company is looking into the claims.

Twitter and The New York Times were both hit by a technique known as "DNS hijacking," according to Robert Masse, president of Montreal, Canada-based security startup Swift Identity.

The technique works by tampering with domain name servers that translate easy-to-remember names like "nytimes.Com" into the numerical Internet Protocol addresses (such as "170.149.168.130") which computers use to route data across the Internet.

Domain name servers basically work as the Web's phone books, and if attackers gains access to one, they can funnel users trying to access sites like The New York Times or Twitter to whichever rogue server they please.

Masse said DNS attacks are popular because they bypass a website's security to attack the very architecture of the Internet itself.

"Companies spend a lot of time, money, resources and defending their servers, but they forget about auxiliary infrastructure that is integrally connected to their networks, like DNS.