Politics is mostly theater to keep anyone from noticing that the people in charge are not the people you see on your televisions. It’s not the tin-foil hat deep-state stuff, but the politicians all report to their donors. Still, the reason the media exists is to put a professional gloss on the whole thing. The people working for the New York Times are supposed to be good at the propaganda stuff. Instead they post stuff like this.
The New York Times Web site was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon after an online attack on the company’s domain name registrar. The attack also forced employees of The Times to take care in sending e-mails.
The hacking was just the latest of a major media organization, with The Financial Times and The Washington Post also having their operations disrupted within the last few months. It was also the second time this month that the Web site of The New York Times was unavailable for several hours.
Marc Frons, chief information officer for The New York Times Company, issued a statement at 4:20 p.m. on Tuesday warning employees that the disruption — which appeared to be affecting the Web site well into the evening — was “the result of a malicious external attack.” He advised employees to “be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved.”
In an interview, Mr. Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as “the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them.” The group attacked the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The Web site first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again. Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr. Frons said that “we believe that we are on the road to fixing the problem.”
The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers who support President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Matt Johansen, head of the Threat Research Center at White Hat Security, posted on Twitter that he was directed to a Syrian Web domain when he tried to view The Times’s Web site.
You see? It’s not a normal system failure that happens every day. It was a super-sophisticated crew of hackers who live in a war torn land without running water and electricity. There’s no question that the people charged with writing up this stuff probably believe it. They are dumb and don’t know any better. The people running the company certainly know better, but they go with it anyway because they think we’re dumb.
It is long past time to stop with the scary hacking stories. The reason they got hacked, assuming it happened, is incompetence. A properly designed and managed site like a news site should never get hacked. In most cases, the site is not even hacked. The hosting service is what goes down and that’s seldom a real hack. Usually it is either a stupid IT guy leaving a door open or an old fashioned hardware failure. There’s also the fact that the New York Times is not exactly a high value target
Of course, the point is to keep beating the war drums over Syria. The same media that spent the entire Bush administration in hysterics of his wars is now out promoting war in Syria. The reason is magic black guy. War in Syria is even dumber than war with Iraq and that was pretty dumb. At least there was some chance of finding a local strong man to take over fro Saddam. Topple over Assad and it is chaos for a generation or longer.
