Iranian Cyber Army, whoever they are, have hacked one of the most popular social networking site – Twitter. It’s a complete chaos right now as nobody knows exactly how this happened. Below is the screenshot of the hacked twitter homepage via TechCrunch
The text below the Iranian flag reads
“USA think they controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don’t. We control and manage internetby our power. So do not try to stimulation Iranian people to ….. Now which country in Embargo list? Iran? USA?”
There is a history between Iran and Twitter. It was well noted and covered in the media that Twitter was used as a tool during the Iranian election protests. The US government actually intervened to assure that Twitter was available to the protestors in Tehran and around the country. This attack may be an act of reprisal from groups who were not happy with the role that Twitter played during the protests.
This is not the first time Twitter is facing security issues. Few months back some hacker had broken down into their Twitter admin account and even hacked their email inboxes.
Update: As per TC, there is speculation at the moment that this may be a DNS redirect, which means that the Twitter.com domain has been redirected to the defacement page. Now the domain itself is down
Update 2: Some people are able to use Twitter normally, as some part of API remains unaffected. Unfortunately status.twitter.com itself is down. Third part sites like br.st shows that Twitter is down when trying to enter status messages, but successfully updates at the end.
Update 3: Consider changing your password just to be on a safer side. No real updates yet. Twitter is down, status blog is down too.
Update 4: Some good news finally. Twitter and Status blog is up and it seems Twitter hack was apparently a DNS attack.
Update 5: So everything is back on track and as always we panicked way too soon. It was a DNS Hijack and not a Hack as such, if you can understand the difference.
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December 18th, 2009 at 9:36 am
I love the “AT GMAIL DOT COM.”
December 18th, 2009 at 10:17 am
@Kento: Ironic isn’t it.. LOL
December 18th, 2009 at 10:44 am
I think you should write a post on how DNS Hijack is different from a Hack. Many people are not clear on the differences. To most Social Engineering and Phishing both seem like Hacks
December 18th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Iranian Cyber Army IS AFFILIATED WITH THE REVLOLUTIONARY GUARDS, IRANS MOST POWERFUL MILITARY ORGANIZATION.
December 18th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Thanks for the tip!
December 18th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I think the attack was more likely DNS Cache Poisoning, but all speculation I guess until Twitter ends the suspense (if they do).
A little more on what happened:
http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/12/we-shall-strike-if-the-leader-orders-twitter-struck-by-iranian-cyber-army/
December 18th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
yach… tks for the update, nothing safe online
December 21st, 2009 at 5:16 am
First, has anyone realized how much media coverage this got the first day and then virtually disappeared from news headlines? – Let’s think logically. This is probably not a group to be feared… if they were so serious you’d imagine they’d have better graphics or at least a better translation. I’m not sure we all have to change our twitter passwords just yet -