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Al Jazeera Wrests Back Its Web Sites From Pro-Assad Hackers

September 5, 2012, 4:35 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Hackers said to be supporters of the Syrian government temporarily took over Web sites of the satellite broadcaster Al Jazeera, which like many other news organizations has been transmitting reports of the fighting in Syria and its violent impact on civilians.

On Tuesday, users who tried to go to Al Jazeera's Arabic and English Web sites were instead directed to an image that said “Hack!!” and “Hacked by Al-Rashedon,” which is an Arabic reference that generally means “the rightly guided” ones, in bold letters across an image of the news organization's page. A Syrian flag waved in the background.

“In response to your stance against Syria (the people and the government), and support for only armed terrorist groups, and publication of news reports that are lies,” the Arabic statement said in part, “this is our response to you.”

On Wednesday, Al Jazeera reported that the cyber attack lasted several hours, by affecting a third-party service provider that distributes the station's online content worldwide in a security breach.

It said the authorities in the United States, where the content distributor is based, were investigating. AlJazeera.net is registered to Network Solutions, whose spokeswoman, Susan Datz Edelman, said she did not have an immediate “definitive” comment.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera, Osama Saeed, said in e-mailed statements: “Some visitors to our Web sites faced disruption after external DNS servers were compromised.”

“The company that operates them quickly resolved this, though some users may continue to experience issues for a couple of days,” he continued. “We th ank our online community for their patience and support.”

In another statement late on Wednesday, he said, “Just to give you a scale of the problem as it stands, we're only around 10 percent lower on our usual number of Web visitors.”

Other news organizations or human rights groups reporting on the conflict have been hacked in protest of their coverage. As The Lede reported last month, the international news agency Reuters temporarily suspended the operation of its blogging platform after its Web site was hacked and false reports of setbacks for Syrian rebels were posted online.

Amnesty International, the human rights organization, was also hacked.

Al Jazeera, based in Doha, Qatar, has aggressively covered the Syrian conflict and the other government upheaval going on in the Middle East for the past few years.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Saeed of Al Jazeera declined to discuss coverage or the possible motive of the hackers.

“We don't know anything about them, and what I understand, there is not much about them in the public domain,” he said.

He said the hacking also affected the organization's Balkans site.