Twitter.com reportedly hacked by "Iranian Cyber Army", slowly coming back up

Posted on December 18th, 2009 at 4:41 pm by Brenton

25 Comments


It seems Twitter has got into the festive season a little too early, and has gone down just minutes ago.

Twitter is now one of the world's most influential social networking sites. (Credit: JoshSemans/Flickr)

Twitter is now one of the world's most influential social networking sites. (Credit: JoshSemans/Flickr)

According to Down For Everyone Or Just Me Twitter is well and truly down at the moment – with pages “failing to open”. Even Twitter’s status page has gone offline, as well as the company’s business Twitter 101 subdomain.

Ever since first launching, Twitter has always had scalability issues – leading to downtime frequently. Recently however, on the back of more funding and more employees the service has managed to scale up and remain up more often than it is down.

UPDATE: TechCrunch is reporting the site was attacked by a group claiming to be the “Iranian Cyber Army” who defaced the site and left this message:

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

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.

UPDATE 2: Given the seemingly large scale of this attack it’s a best bet to change passwords on your major accounts if they are the same as your Twitter account. It seems this is one huge security compromise and its best to be on the safe side.

UPDATE 3: The web is lighting up with reports on what’s going on. No one seems to know who this group is yet, and Twitter hasn’t yet come back up. Strangely enough some API calls still seem to be getting through, and Twitter Search is still working.

UPDATE 4: And we’re back it seems. Twitter.com is working again. No word yet on what damage (if any) was done. Twitter’s status site is still down though. It seems the other subdomains are slowly coming back online – the API is now working again. Twitter’s help site still seems to be down, although this is more likely a caching issue rather than anything else.

UPDATE 5: Twitter’s Status site is now back online – here’s the official word so far:

We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.

UPDATE 6: And there’s no need to panic now or change your passwords. Twitter has confirmed the DNS records were “temporarily compromised” which means user data wasn’t touched and the “hackers” simply redirected users to their own website. Full tweet below:

Update (11:28p): Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.

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The author of this post, Brenton, can be emailed at brenton.currie@itechreport.com.
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