WASHINGTON — Al-Qaeda’s main Web forums have been off-line for the past 11 days in what experts say is the longest sustained outages of the sites since they began operating eight years ago.
No one has publicly claimed responsibility for disabling the sites, but the breadth and the duration of the outages have prompted some experts to conclude the forums have been taken down in a cyberattack — launched perhaps by a government, government-backed organization or hacking group.
The administrator of a second-tier al-Qaeda site recently posted a message on an online forum saying that “the media arena is witnessing a vicious attack by the cross and its helpers on the jihadi media castles.”
U.S. government agencies, including U.S. Cyber Command, had no role in the outages, according to officials who would speak about the issue only on condition of anonymity.
