The dust is still settling from yesterday's attacks on
Twitter and
the New York Times, but observers have already gained valuable insight into the methods that made the hacks possible.
The LA Times is reporting that the hacks originated with a phishing email sent
by the Syrian Electronic Army to the CTO of MelbourneIT, the DNS registrar for both Twitter and the
New York Times. The emails were convincing enough to trick one of Melbourne's resellers into giving up login credentials, which gave the hackers a crucial opening. From there, they were able to acquire the credentials of one of MelbourneIT's resellers, and go to work redirecting NYTimes.com visitors to the SEA's own IP address.
