Twitter Hacked

Twitter was hacked and defaced by a group calling themselves The Iranian Cyber Army.  The DNS attack redirected users to a page displaying the group's name, Gmail address and the following message: "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 popular social networking service was down for several hours.  Upon coming back up, the company released a message that there would be a full investigation into the breach.

Twitter has had problems with security for some time--as recently as two months ago their web servers were misconfigured to reveal internal network information. However, there is a history between Iran and Twitter in that Twitter was used as a tool during the Iranian election protests. In what was otherwise a media black-out, the US government intervened to assure that Twitter was available to the protestors in Tehran and around the country.  Twitter allowed individuals to document and inform the rest of the world about the violence and bloodshed being propogated by the regime. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week was quoted by a senior official as saying, "Using the Internet and Twitter against the Iranian regime is something extraordinary that the U.S. can do." This attack may be an act of reprisal from those not happy with the role that Twitter played during the protests.