The Washington Post was hacked

{mosads}“The group is a hacker collective that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” the newspaper said in a statement. “The Post is working to resolve the issue.”

Later Thursday, the newspaper’s managing editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz added that the post newsroom has been the subject of a “phishing attack” to gain passwords over the past few days. He said the redirection took place for about 30 minutes and had been resolved. 

“We have taken defensive measures and removed the offending module. At this time, we believe there are no other issues affecting The Post site,” he said. 

Garcia-Ruiz said the group gained entry into the site using a partnering company— Outbrain, which is used to recommend other articles and content to readers. 

The hacking group also claimed credit for attacking CNN and Time, which also partner with Outbrain. Though, CNN reported it was not directly affected. 

The group is most known for hacking into The Associated Press’s twitter account in April and sending out a message indicating President Obama had been injured in an explosion. 

The AP quickly took down the tweet but not before the message had caused a short-lived drop in the financial markets.

The New York Times website also temporarily went down Wednesday. Readers found a white page with the message: “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” when trying to access Web pages. 

The Times said it believed outage was caused by “an internal issue” prior to a scheduled maintenance update.

Earlier this year, both newspapers and The Wall Street Journal said Chinese hackers had also breached their computer systems.

— This story was updated at 4:02 p.m.