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Twitter Temporarily Toppled by 'Iranian Hackers' Last Night

by Terrence O'Brien on December 18, 2009 at 11:01 AM

If you tried to visit Twitter last night, at around 1 a.m. EST you might have seen this message in broken English:
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don't, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To....

NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;)
Take Care.
Who exactly the Iranian Cyber Army is isn't exactly clear, but it's believed the attack may be a retaliation by government loyalists for the micro-blogging service's role in protests following the controversial re-"election" of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this summer. TechCrunch writes that Google searches for "Twitter" last night revealed the following message translated from Farsi/Persian:
"In the name of God, As an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter's interference sly which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country..."


The act of vandalism targeted Twitter's DNS servers, and redirected all traffic from Twitter.com to the page above with the message from the hackers and a flag. Since the attack was a redirect, no account information was compromised, but, considering Twitter's past issues with security, the hack is worrisome. How hard would it be for a more malicious, and less political, group of hackers to craft a convincing Twitter log-in page and hijack all traffic directed to Twitter.com?

The message from the Iranian Cyber Army remained up for about an hour before Twitter isolated the issue on its DNS servers and restored the site. During that time, however, Twitter's services continued to function, so if you use a client such as TweetDeck or Tweetie, you would have never notice the site had been hacked.

Twitter has been pushing hard to become a legitimate business tool, and many corporate applications are rushing to integrate the service. But if it wants to build a significant base in the corporate world, Twitter is going to have to start focusing heavily on security or businesses will simply look elsewhere for their micro-blogging needs. [From: CNET, ZDNET, TechCrunch, and Download Squad]

Tags: hack, iran, iranian cyber army, Iranian Elections, IranianCyberArmy, IranianElections, protest, security, top, twitter, web

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