Twitter Defaced in DNS Attack

Twitter doesn't have the best record when it comes to stability or security and it looks like all the recent hires haven't done much good. Twitter's famed Fail Whale doesn't show up as often as it once did, but the site still goes down more than other similar services its size. This time, things are more serious though, the site has been hacked and defaced by Iranian activists. Twitter is now back up and it has responded officially, though there aren't that many details at the moment other than it was a DNS attack and that users were redirected from twitter.com and several subdomains to a site set up by the attackers.

“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,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote.

The attack started at about 10 pm PST at which time visitors to the site we're greeted with a message from a group billing itself as “Iranian Cyber Army.” Also targeted seems to be mawjcamp.org which is still sporting the message at this time. A cached version of the site dating from two days ago shows it has been like this for at least since then.

“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,” the message read.

Twitter made the official announcement about an hour ago, at the time of writing, but the Twitter blog was down up to a short while ago. The blog is on its own domain 'blog.twitter.com' but is actually hosted by Google-owned Blogger, Twitter's cofounders are the creators of the blogging platform. The site, though, was live suggesting that Google may have taken preventive measures in response to the DNS attack. Twitter says it will provide updates when it has more details.