British newspaper "The Guardian" reported that the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) took responsibility of attacking popular sites The New York Times and Twitter after hacking into the system of web hosting company Melbourne IT. New York Times went offline Tuesday, August 14, the second of the news outfit's failure within a span of two weeks. Twitter also experienced a Denial of Service (DNS) attack, which made viewing of photos unavailable. Both of the companies' domains, along with other less popular sites, registered with Melbourne IT.

Melbourne IT Chief Executive The Hnarakis said that the hackers accessed the company's system using a valid user name and password. The hosting company had already changed its system's log in and password information.

NYT Chief Information Officer Marc Frons expressed dismay over the security break-in. "It's sort of like breaking into the local savings and loan versus breaking into Fort Knox. A domain registrar should have extremely tight security because they are holding the security to hundreds, if not thousands, of websites," he said.

Syrian Electronic Army had purportedly carried out attacks on western sites in the past months in support of Syrian president Bashar Assad. US and other western allies currently have tense ties with Syria, especially after the alleged chemical attack done last August 21.

There had been no information released on how much business was lost attributable to the hacking incident. In an earlier report, industry observers had concluded that a 45-minute outage of Amazon's website caused the e-commerce company USD4.7 million in lost revenue. A recent 5-minute Google outage lost the company USD500,000.