Al-Arabiya site downed by hackers A Distribute Denial of Service (DDOS) attack overloaded al-Arabiya\'s website on both English and Arabic on Monday. The news site had previously been targeted by the Syrian Electronic Army on March. 26 2011 Who took over al-Arabiya\'s facebook page to post their content and criticize their TV channel for what they viewed as the \"destruction of Egypt and Libya.\" Their facebook and twitter were again infiltrated on April 23 2012 where further misinformation was posted.
The news site is blocked in Syria although rebels and organizations such as anonymous have spread information on how to out-smart the state\'s censorship measures.
DDOS attacks harness thousands of infected computers to repeatedly attempt to access a site all at the same time, this overwhelms the server and causes the website to become unavailable. This type of attacks have been described as both \"cyber terrorism\" and as a form of legitimate protest.
Research by Arabstoday revealed that the site is still at best experiencing slow loading times and at worst unavailable.