Al-Qaeda websites go silent 'after cyber attack'

"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 several 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.


"If someone is a true believer in the cause, they're going to go to the forum because they know it's the only place they can get al-Qaeda's message."


One of the two main sites, Shamukh al-Islam, reappeared online on Monday but had not yet resumed message threads, he said.