Twitter.com Taken Over, Claims Syrian Electronic Army Twitter Account
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Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — A Twitter account allegedly belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army has claimed to have taken over Twitter.com, though the site appeared to be functioning normally.
A Twitter account apparently belonging to the hacker group claimed it hacked into Twitter’s registry account, or what is known as a domain name server (DNS).
The account tweeted Tuesday, “Hi @Twitter, look at your domain, its owned by #SEA :),” and posted a screenshot of what appeared to be the search results for Twitter’s domain registry on the domain name registration database, Whois.DomainTools.com.
In the screenshot, it appeared that some of the contact information was changed.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to ABC News that the company was looking into SEA’s claims.
The same Twitter account also claimed the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the New York Times site and Huffington Post UK’s DNS accounts.
While the Huffington Post’s UK website appeared to be functioning normally, the New York Times’ website appeared to be unavailable for several hours, continuing into this evening.
The New York Times said that it believed the outage was a result of an external “malicious attack.” When asked by ABC News about any Syria links, New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy had no comment.
In the past, the same Twitter account claimed responsibility on behalf of the Syrian Electronic Army for an Aug. 15 attack on the Washington Post, as well as attacks on the websites for CNN and Time.
In recent months, the SEA has publicly taken credit for a series of high-profile cyber assaults including taking over the Twitter feeds of prominent organizations like The Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Post and the satirical news site The Onion.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio