Hours after US officials declared that the United States may launch missile strikes against the Syrian government, pro-Assad hackers known as the Syrian Electronic Army hijacked the domain name servers of several media companies. The New York Times website was down for several hours, although the company quickly established a backup site to continue their reporting. The DNS of Twitter and Huffington Post UK were also hacked, redirecting users to a server that appeared to be hosted by the SEA.

Media companies including the New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post lost control of some of their websites after hackers supporting the Syrian government breached the Australian internet company that manages many major site addresses. The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that has previously attacked media organisations that it considers hostile to the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages late on Tuesday.

On Monday, Google became one of the first American companies to take advantage of newly loosened U.S. sanctions against Iran. With a Google Plus post, the search giant announced that it was offering its Play store to Iranian citizens, allowing them to download free apps from its app marketplace. The Treasury Department, which sets the export restrictions, issued the new rules back in May. But the recent easing is actually part of a longer process that doesn’t just change U.S.

India's online population is growing six times as fast as the global average and now ranks as the third largest in the world after China and the US, a new study has indicated. The 2013 India Digital Future In Focus report from comScore, the digital measurement company, pulled together data from its different surveys to identify prevailing trends in web usage, online video, social networking and online retail.

To further advance Nigeria’s course on the cyberspace, the National Council on Communication Technology (NCCT), has recommended that all state governments and their agencies should switch to the country’s domain name and adopt the gov.ng platform. NCCT, which gave August 18, 2014 as deadline date for the switch to have been completed, noted that this would not only create a better cyberspace, but also engender economic growth.

The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has invited Azerbaijan to join the leadership of the organization. At a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the use of national top-level domain name. Az, Vice President of ICANN Veni Markovski called on Azerbaijan to increase its participation in the work of the organization, 1news.az reports.

Facebook’s global partnership to expand Internet access in the developing world is getting a lot of attention, despite the campaign’s initial lack of specifics on how it plans to achieve its goals. The initiative — which hopes to get two-thirds of the world’s population online through cheaper smartphones that make a more efficient use of current networks — has been both hailed as a step in the right direction and criticized as a thinly veiled business strategy to reached untapped markets in the developing world.

Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies, The Independent has learnt. The station is able to tap into and extract data from the underwater fibre-optic cables passing through the region. The information is then processed for intelligence and passed to GCHQ in Cheltenham and shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.