New York Times Outage Caused By Security Breach at Australian IT Firm

Hackers got user name and password from domain registrar

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Scott Eells / Bloomberg / Getty Images

The New York Times Co. offices in New York, July 2013.

The New York Times’ domain registrar, the Australian firm Melbourne IT, has said that a security breach of its systems by hackers led to the six-hour shutdown of the news organization’s website Tuesday, Australian media have reported.

The firm said the outage was brought about by hackers who managed to gain access to emails and uncover the user name and password of one of the company’s account holders. That account held the records of several domain names, including nytimes.com.

Melbourne IT issued a statement saying that it was “currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the account credentials.”

The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group, has claimed responsibility for the New York Times breach and attacks in recent months on other news organizations, including CBS News, the BBC and Al-Jazeera.

[The Australian]

[L.A. Times]