The Al Jazeera English website was attacked and defaced on January 29 by hackers supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Targeting the news organization's "Syria Live Blog," which has been providing ongoing coverage of the Arab League's observer mission to Syria and developments in the ongoing unrest in the country, the hacker group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army posted pro-Assad and pro-Syrian government images to the site.

The relationship of the Syrian Electronic Army to the government itself is unclear. However, the group's domain was registered in May of 2011 in Tartous, Syria, and its site is hosted on servers maintained by the Syrian Computer Society—a group Assad was the head of before assuming Syria's presidency, and which introduced the Internet to Syria in 2001.

The attack started at about 2:30 PM Central Time, just after Al Jazeera posted a report on casualties reported by the Local Coordinating Committees, an activist network in Syria. On their own site, the Syrian Electronic Army announced the "code re-penetration" of the site by a "professional Syrian battalion" of hackers, denouncing Al Jazeera for broadcasting "false and fabricated news" to "ignite sedition" among the people of Syria and achieve the goals of "Washington and Tel Aviv."

This is the second attack against Al Jazeera this month claimed by the pro-Assad hacktivist group. In September, the group attacked Harvard University's site, and keeps a graphic from Harvard's site on its homepage as a trophy of that exploit. In August, the group attacked the Tumblr site set up by YourAnonNews in response to Anonymous' attacks on Syrian government sites.