New York Times, Twitter and Huffington Post Domains hijacked by Syrian Electronic Army

Media companies including the New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post has been unavailable since Tuesday after the external malicious attack by a group of hackers supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

For the second time this month, the New York Times' website has gone down. "The New York Times website was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon following an attack on the company's domain name registrar, Melbourne IT," the Times wrote.

In its most recent alleged attack, SEA was apparently able to use what's called a spear phishing attack to gain access to the Australia-based domain registrar for The New York Times website and read: "Hacked by SEA, Your server security is very weak."

It appears the domain name system (DNS) for NYTimes.com was rerouted, but can be found using its numerical Internet Protocol addresses, which is 170.149.168.130. The New York Times website has been restored just now, at least temporarily a day after.

The Huffington Post and Twitter also confirmed their websites were affected by the DNS attacks. For Twitter, the Tuesday attack on its website used for images resulted in users having trouble viewing photos.

A Twitter account that seemingly belongs to SEA showed an image that indicates SEA also attacked Twitter's domain.

The SEA website launched in May 2011 stating the group's mission: to attack the enemies of the Syrian government, mainly those who fabricated stories about the Syrian civil war.

The Syrian Electronic Army has previously claimed responsibility for attacking the websites or Twitter accounts of the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Agence France-Press, 60 Minutes, CBS News, National Public Radio, The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera English and the BBC.