Syrian Electronic Army Finds Third-Party Doorway to NYT, Twitter in Phishing Attack

The Syrian Electronic Army, a mysterious pro-Assad hacker group, struck again Tuesday afternoon, taking control of The New York Times and Twitter Internet domains, among others

The Syrian hackers compromised these high-profile websites by targeting the domain name registrar Melbourne IT, an Australian company that sells website addresses such as Mashable.com. The hackers didn't use sophisticated hacking techniques or malware to carry out their attack, all they needed was their usual weapon of choice: a phishing attack

"A targeted phishing attack was used to gain access to the credentials of users of a Melbourne IT reseller account," wrote Bruce Tonkin, Melbourne IT's Chief Technology officer, in an email to Mashable. "We have obtained a copy of the phishing email and have notified the recipients of the phishing email to update their passwords. We have also temporarily suspended access to affected user accounts until passwords have been changed," Tonkin said. Read more...