Intellectual Property Law

Twitter DNS Hacked, Redirected

By David Kravets

Twitter’s website went offline for about an hour Thursday, with many tweeters redirected to a defacement page boasting “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”

Twitter acknowledged the 10 p.m. takeover, one in a series of security lapses to hit the popular microbloging service. Twitter said its DNS records “were temporarily compromised.”

Among other statements, the unknown group wrote in Perso-Arabic:

“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….”

The hijacking came nearly six months after the microblogging service, with some 20 million users, helped Iranian protesters plan presidential election results. In a bid to help the protesters, the Obama administration convinced Twitter to delay scheduled June maintenance that would have tentatively taken Twitter offline.

See Also:

• Twitter Suspends Researcher Over Security Warning
• Weak Password Brings ‘Happiness’ to Twitter Hacker
• Twitter Breached Again
• Trick or Tweet? Malware Abundant in Twitter URLs
• Fed’s Search of Twittering Anarchist Upheld
• Britney, Obama Twitter Feeds Hijacked Following Phishing Attack

Full post as published by Threat Level on December 18, 2009 (boomark / email).