Iranian Cyber Army Attack Twitter

Yep the world’s twitterers were lost with nowhere to tweet briefly today, when the site was down. The truth is that Twitter had been attacked by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army. But the interesting fact was they achieved this without actually directly attacking the Twitter servers.

The twitter hack was actually a DNS based attack, it was their DNS record which were targeted. Without DNS the Internet simply wouldn’t work. When you type a web address into your browser, then it is DNS which is responsible for find the address of the correct web site and directing you there. The web address is simply being mapped to an IP address.

So in this case it looks like the Iranian Cyber Army changed the Twitter DNS records to point at a different server where they put up a cheesy political message. The site was inaccessible for about an hour, whilst there were some very worried folk at Twitter HQ.

These hackers may have been unknown but they had technical skills. DNS is one of the weak points of most web sites, Google have been through this experience too and many more will definitely follow. It is all very well having a super secure hacker proof server, but if your DNS records are changed nobody will ever get to your site.

Thankfully in this case all that we got was a few lost tweets, but it could have been much worse. Imagine if this attack had been based with criminal rather than political intent. The redirected page could easily have been a copy of the Twitter logon page designed to steal users logon credentials. I wonder how many accounts could have been stolen in an hour? The possibilities for Identity theft are numerous? Remember I’ll guarantee many of these Twitter logons will also be user logins to banks, shop accounts etc.

I don’t use Twitter but I’ll tell you what, if I did I’d be rapidly changing my passwords anyway. Your online identity is valuable take care of it, more information here – surfing anonymously