Twitter DNS Hijacked By ‘Iranian Cyber Army’, Inaccessible And Defaced For An Hour
Twitter.com was down Thursday evening, and it appears that the microblogging site may have been a victim of DNS hijacking.
The site, which was inaccessible for about an hour starting around 10 p.m. PST, was defaced with the following image before it was taken offline:
The message at the bottom of the image appears to be written in Perso-Arabic script and when translated to English it read:
Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
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.
Twitter’s status blog was also inaccessible.
A Twitter update message posted at 11:28 p.m. said the site was “working to recovery from an unplanned downtime” and indicated that the incident was indeed a hijacking of Twitter’s DNS records:
Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.
Security has been a thorny issue for Twitter in the past. In January, a hacker hijacked CNN anchor Rick Sanchez’s feed and proclaimed the journalist was “high on crack.” Twitter users have also been the target of a password-stealing phishing scam. Disguising itself as a private message that led to a fake Twitter log-in screen, the scam was widespread enough for Twitter to put a warning message on all members’ home pages alerting them of the issue.
Certainly, there is a contentious history between Twitter and Iran. In the wake of supposed results of that nation’s presidential election in June, protesters in Iran used Twitter to skirt government filters to report events, express outrage, and get people out to opposition rallies. Twitter even rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval at the request of the U.S. Department of State.
Currently Twitter Blog says:
As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed. As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully.
Credit: CNET News
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