Al-Qaeda Sites Go Silent in Possible Cyber Attack

Al-Qaeda's main Internet sites have gone silent for more than a week in an unprecedented outage for the extremist network's online forums, analysts said Tuesday.

"All of them essentially went down" as of March 23, said Aaron Zelin, a researcher at the politics department at Brandeis University.

The outage hit a number of online forums including two "flagship" sites, al-Fida and Shamukh al-Islam, which serve as a channel for Al-Qaeda forums, providing a stamp of approval for any associated sites, Zelin said.

"The forums authenticate Al-Qaeda's message, therefore they're very important," said Zelin, who writes about extremist Islamist sites on jihadology.net.

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