Hacktivists loyal to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad have taken over The New York Times' web address to broadcast a circa-1998-style defacement message: "Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army."

There's no evidence that the Times' internal systems were compromised. Instead, the attackers got control of the NYTimes.com domain name this afternoon through the paper's domain name registrar, Melbourne IT, then set it to map to a Russian hosting service delivering the message. Judging from the response on Twitter, some visitors were served a large image of the hacker group's logo, but most just got timeout errors.

The Syrian Electronic Army has staged a number of attacks in recent months, including an attack on *The Washington Post'*s website. As of this writing, the Times website is still down.

The hacker gang boasted on its Twitter feed today that it also wrested control of one of Twitter's domains, and Whois records show that the administrative and technical contacts were set to "SEA SEA." Twitter says image serving was temporarily disrupted as a result.

The Times is using its Twitter feed to direct users to an alternate domain, news.nytco.com.

Updated 19:15