Al-Jazeera the internet wing of the Arab Satellite news agency has suffered an organised ‘hack attack’ blasting it off the face of cyber-space.

Throughout today [March 26 New Zealand time] the news agency has been offline.

Aljazeera’s two Domain Name Servers (DNS), both its primary DNS and Secondary DNS, have been inaccessible throughout the day.

ZDNet Australia reports this “is unlikely to result from too much ‘legitimate’ traffic going to the site. DNS processing does not use a lot of system resources, and does not use a lot of traffic. Furthermore, the two name servers are hosted on different IP ranges, which is unlikely to spring from a run-of-the-mill system outage,” ZDNet reports.
See… ZDNet’s report here…

It is suspected that the US Government is behind the attack. The Pentagon has refused to comment.

Aljazeera, earlier this week, broadcast images of United States soldiers who were captured by Iraqi forces. It also published images of at least eight dead US soldiers. This drew a stinging attack from Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld who cited the broadcast as being against the Geneva Convention.

Aljazeera attempted to launch a new English site today (http://english.aljazeera.net) but was taken out by ‘hackers’ within hours. Shortly after, its Arabic-language site (www.aljazeera.net) also evaporated into the cyber-ether.

Neither primary host provider company Navlink, or US-based secondary DNS host company, DataPipe, would expand on what has brought the two Al Jazeera sites down.

Al Jazeera's IT manager, Salah Al Seddiqui, has reportedly stated the network will move its servers from the United States to Europe where Internet Host companies are less likely to be forced by sensitive government agencies to remove host services to rogue news sites.