New York Times website goes offline in hacker attack

August 28, 2013 - 09:51 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - The New York Times website has gone offline for the second time this month after what the company described as a "malicious external attack," BBC News said.

On its Facebook page, the Times said it was working to fix the outage, which appears to have started at 15:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, August 28.

A technical problem knocked NYTimes.com offline on 14 August.

Analysts said evidence showed a group supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was behind Tuesday's attack.

The website was partially back online three hours later, although some users still reported difficulties. During the outage the New York Times published new articles on its Facebook page as well as a mirror site.

Mark Frons, the company's chief information officer, warned New York Times employees the attack was perpetrated by the Syrian Electronic Army, which backs Assad, "or someone trying very hard to be them".

He cautioned staff to "be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved".

Security experts said there was enough evidence to link the hacking group to the outage.

In a separate posting on Tuesday, the group also claimed responsibility for hacking Twitter's administrative contact information.

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