Syrian group hacks Twitter, Huffington Post and New York Times sites

San Francisco, Aug 28: Media giants like the New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post on Tuesday lost control of their websites after hackers supporting the Syrian government breached an Australian internet company that manages many major site addresses.

The hacker group known as The Syrian Electronic Army, has earlier too attacked media organisations that it considers vulnerable to the Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad and claimed in a series of Twitter messages that they were the ones behind the Twitter and the Huffington Post attacks.

Security experts said that the NYT.com, the only site with hour long outages, redirected its visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went completely dark .

The Huffington Post attack however was not so bad as it was limited to the blogging platform's UK web address. Twitter said that the hacking led to availbility issues for over an hour but no user information was compromised.

The attacks come in the wake of the Obama government that is considering to take action against the Syrian government that has been locked for more than two years in a bloody struggle against the rebels.

The hackers had earlier targeted websites be;longing to CNN, Times and the Washington Post by breaching a third party service that was used by those sites.

Once the Melbourne IT firm was notified of the same, they restored the correct domain name, changed the passwords and locked the records to prevent any further damage,

OneIndia News