14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, on June 21, at 9:00AM PDT, Twitter started experiencing some performance issues and became intermitently inaccessible for around three hours. The UGNazi collective has taken credit for the downtime, but the company denies that the outage had anything to do with hackers.
“We just #TangoDown'd http://twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide! #UGNazi,” the hackers wrote in a tweet.
The hackers are renowned for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on important websites, but this doesn’t seem to be their work, at least that’s what Twitter representatives say.
“A cascaded bug has an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element; its effect ‘cascades’ into other elements as well,” read a tweet posted by Twitter Comms after the site came back online.
While everyone was wondering if the “cascaded bug” wasn’t actually caused by the distributed denial-of-service attack initiated by UGNazi, the company came forward with a detailed blog post.
“This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today,” said Mazen Rawashdeh, VP of engineering at Twitter.
Initially, the UGNazi group was just as other hacktivist teams. They attacked and defaced government and company websites to unmask injustices and corruption, but in the past period they raised a lot of controversy by attacking sites such as the Wounded Warrior Project, which provides services and programs to injured members of the US military.
Some of the hacks they have taken credit for turned out to be true. For instance, CloudFlare, MyBB, WHMCS and others have confirmed that the hackers have managed to breach their systems by relying on social engineering and other methods.
However, some of their hacks have raised a lot of questions, especially one of the latest ones in which they’ve claimed to have obtained access to Google’s Mark Monitor account.
At the time, the organization denied that Google's account was accessed.
“We protect the domain name portfolios of the most highly trafficked sites so we take security very seriously,” a company representative said at the time.