Today on the net: pro-Assad hackers launch cyber attacks on Twitter and the New York Times. Also, the photo of a soccer player kissing his male friend sparks fierce debate in Brazil. Finally, Nelson Mandela now has his own social network.
Cyber attacks hit New York Times and Twitter
The New York Times website was hit by a cyber-attack on Tuesday, and was inaccessible for some American web users for several hours. The daily had no choice but to offer readers an alternative way to reach the site so that they could continue to access stories.
Micro blogging site Twitter also suffered a similar outage, with technical problems affecting its image hosting service. According to the San Francisco-based firm, however none of its user’s data was compromised.
The UK version of the Huffington Post was also targeted in this series of cyber-attacks, with the Syrian Electronic Army, the SEA, claiming responsibility. The pro-Bashar al-Assad hacker group has been boasting of the sabotage online, saying they have taken control of the website addresses which are all managed by the same Australian company.
The SEA hackers have pulled off a number of attacks on Western media, including CNN and France 24 since the start of the Syrian conflict. They are also said to assist the intelligence services in tracking down government opponents and run propaganda campaigns for the Damascus regime on social networks.
And as the international community prepares for possible military intervention, the past few days have seen Assad sympathizers bombard Barack Obama’s Facebook page with hundreds of threats of retaliation and warnings of counter attack. 
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