Al Qaeda magazine may have been hacked

A new issue of English-language al-Qaeda magazine linked to the Boston terrorist attacks has possibly been hacked by Western intelligence agencies.

The magazine's content posted on the terror group's website earlier this week was scrambled beyond its cover page.

According to the Washington Times, the magazine, produced by al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which regularly includes how-to instructions for followers to carry out terrorist attacks in the West, has received significant scrutiny in recent weeks.

Investigators believe that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev accessed Inspire magazine, and the material had instructions on bomb-making, a law enforcement official told CNN earlier this month.

The purported new issue of Inspire magazine was located by Flashpoint Partners, an American outfit that tracks jihadist websites.

According to the report, Josh Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Flashpoint, said they detected the new posting on the administrator account of the top-tier, password-protected forum Al Fidaa, a website regularly used to disseminate propaganda from al Qaeda and its affiliates, on Tuesday evening.

All the links led to the same corrupted PDF file, and within minutes, the posting had been deleted from the web forum completely.

The purported new issue titled "How did it come to this?" was dated "Spring 2013" and contained no mention of the Boston attack on its cover page.

The cover page included a content caption "Open Source Jihad," which in past issues has been a section featuring do-it-yourself terrorism advice, the report added.