Twitter, New York Times hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

Twitter and The New York Times were hit with cyber attacks on Tuesday, with credit quickly claimed by a group backing embattled Syrian strongman Bashar Al-Assad. The Syrian Electronic Army, ironically, used Twitter to tout its efforts to take down the globally popular one-to-many messaging service and the Times news website.

"Media is going down," a message at the SEA Twitter account proclaimed. "Twitter, are you ready?"

The cyber attack was evidently aimed at the Domain Name System that acts as a directory of sorts for routing online traffic to website addresses.

Hackers can hijack web traffic by altering DNS address information to send site visitors to websites of their choosing.