The New York Times website was unavailable to its readers yesterday afternoon in the US, after a cyber attack on the organisation's web host, Melbourne IT.
Twitter, which uses Melbourne IT as a domain name registrar, was also affected by the denial-of-service attack.
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According to a New York Times post, the attack prompted the newspaper to warn its employees about their use of emails.
Marc Frons, CIO at The New York Times, issued a statement to employees warning them that the disruption was "the result of a malicious external attack" and advised them to "be careful when sending email communications until this situation is resolved".
Frons said that the attack is thought to have stemmed from a group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) "or someone trying hard to be them". The group is known to support Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and said that it "owned" Twitter's domain by tweeting an image of Twitter's domain name registry records.
The New York Times website was back up yesterday, having been down for several hours, while Twitter said it regained control of its domain but that "viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted".
The social networking company said that no user information had been affected.
Melbourne IT has since confirmed that one of its resellers was responsible for the attack, and that it would check its logs to try to identify the party behind the attack, and also review the amount of security it could add to its reseller accounts.
This is not the first time that the Syrian Electronic Army has been associated with cyber attacks. In May, it disrupted The Financial Times, and earlier this month it allegedly hacked The Washington Post's website, while The Guardian, CNN and Time magazine websites have all also been previously targeted by the group.
However, Frons claimed that the assault on The New York Times was more sophisticated than attacks on other news outlets.
"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 web sites," he said.
