"New York Times" Website Goes Down: Hack Suspected - East Idaho News
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“New York Times” Website Goes Down: Hack Suspected

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082713 NYTDownscreen?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1377639813177ABC News(NEW YORK) — For the second time this month, the New York Times‘ website has gone down.

However, unlike the first outage on Aug. 14, which was blamed on server problems, the company has said that it believes Tuesday’s outage was a result of an external “malicious attack.”

When reached by ABC News, Eileen Murphy, a New York Times spokeswoman, repeated her prior claim via Twitter that the outage was only affecting some users and that the company believed it was a malicious attack.

Matt Johansen, the manager for the Threat Research Center at security company WhiteHat, tweeted that the New York Times domain name system was pointing to the Syrian Electronic Army domain.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) took responsibility for taking down The Washington Post on Aug. 15.

When asked by ABC News about any Syria links, Murphy had no comment.

While the SEA did not immediately appear to take responsibility for the New York Times hack, it did tweet Tuesday: “Hi @Twitter, look at your domain, its owned by #SEA. http://whois.domaintools.com/twitter.com”

Twitter.com was not immediately impacted and a Twitter official told ABC News it was looking into the SEA’s claims.

The New York Times site, however, was down for more than two hours as of approximately 5:40 p.m. ET. It appeared the site went down or began to have performance issues starting at approximately 3:30 p.m. ET.

On Aug. 14, the Times‘ homepage went dark for about two hours.

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