Matthew 24:6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
Editor’s Note: In May 2011, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Pentagon: Cyber Attacks Can Count as Acts of War.” The article began, “The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.”
The Syrian Electronic Army, who support the government of Bashir al-Assad in its battle against rebels, launched a massive cyberattack Tuesday against the New York Times and Twitter.
The attack was the most severe yet for the group which in the last few months has also hit the Financial Times, BBC, CNN and the Washington Post.
The left-wing website Huffington Post was also hit in the Tuesday attack.
The attack focused on changing the DNS information for the websites domains. The DNS information is what allows a user to type in an easy to remember name such as “nytimes.com” rather than a series numbers in an IP address like 192.168.1.1. The hackers broke into the hosting company, Melbourne IT, and pointed the websites to servers hosted by the SEA.
The group even taunted Twitter by posting on their account “Hi @Twitter, look at your domain, its owned by #SEA. : )”
The New York Times continued to post news on their Facebook page during the outage using a backup server. The main NYTimes website was still unavailable Wednesday morning. Because of the nature of IP addresses and DNS, local host servers used by most web surfers could take days to point back to the correct DNS for the damaged sites.
