New York Times and Twitter struggle after Syrian

The newspaper and social network were hit after their domain name details were maliciously edited by hackers.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, says it carried out the attack.

It is the most severe attack so far carried out by the group.

In recent months, the hackers have targeted major media companies including the Financial Times, Washington Post, CNN and BBC.

But in this latest attack, the SEA was able to cause more sustained damage with a technique which also saw news and comment site the Huffington Post hit.

The attacked domains were managed by hosting company Melbourne IT, which has said it is looking at "additional layers of security" for protecting domain details.

DNS changes

The attack focused on editing DNS - Domain Name System - information.

The DNS is used to direct web traffic to a specific server containing the website a user wants to visit.

In simple terms, it means we can browse the web using easy-to-remember addresses like bbc.com, rather than by IP addresses - a string of numbers separated by dots. The SEA was able to gain access to Melbourne IT's system, where Twitter and the New York Times registered their respective domains.

It meant that the hackers could change DNS details so that instead of, for example, "nytimes.com" taking you to the Times' servers, the domain was instead pointed to a website hosted by the SEA.

In Twitter's case, the SEA targeted twimg.com - a separate domain that the social network used to store image data, as well as styling code.

While Twitter itself remained active, the disruption to twimg.com meant many pages displayed incorrectly.

In a statement, Twitter said that no user data had been affected.

The SEA used its Twitter account to publicise the attacks on both sites, posting images of its work.

"Hi @Twitter," the group said in one tweet, "look at your domain, its owned by #SEA "

'Through the front door'

Melbourne IT blamed the breach on a reseller - a third party that sells domains through the company's system.

Melbourne IT said the reseller's log-in credentials had been obtained, and that with them the SEA could enter through the "front door" and carry out the attack. "If you've got a valid user name and password," chief executive Theo Hnarakis told ABC (Australia), "the assumption from our systems is that you are the authorised owner and user of that domain name."

In a further statement, the company said: "We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law enforcement bodies."