“Syrian Electronic Army infiltrated its major U.S. media targets indirectly, by compromising a related third party.
“The hack that took down The New York Times homepage on Tuesday afternoon and knocked out embedded images on Twitter was the result of a phishing attack on an Australian Web-hosting firm, Melbourne IT, the firm confirmed Tuesday evening.”
Though Twitter and The New York Times are back up, they’re still not running at full capacity. According to theguardian.com:
“Images and some avatars posted to Twitter’s twimg.com domain are not appearing when viewed on the web or in Twitter applications because the domain where the pictures are posted, twimg.com, had its domain name details altered on Tuesday.
“The New York Times is also affected by the hack, which was carried out against an Australian registrar, Melbourne IT, which separately confirmed that it had been the cause of the failure.”
This news is simultaneously interesting and scary. On one hand, we’re seeing the future of warfare migrate to the cyberworld as many predicted it would decades ago. On the other hand, societies are so dependent on cyber technology that any organization seen as a threat to those technologies must be taken seriously. If a group like SEA could take down sites as large as Twitter and The New York Times, it isn’t a stretch for them to target personal banking or something as important.
