Twitter.com hijacked by 'Iranian cyber army'
Hackers hijacked the Web site of micro-blogging communityTwitter.com early Friday, briefly redirecting users to a Web page for a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army."
The attackers apparently were able to redirect Twitter users by stealing the credentials needed to administer the domain name system (DNS) records for Twitter.com. DNS servers act as a kind of phone book for Internet traffic, translating human-friendly Web site names like "Twitter.com" into numeric Internet addresses that are easier for computers to handle.
"Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed," the company said in a brief statement on its Web site. "We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon."
Twitter's DNS service is provided by Manchester, N.H. based Dyn Inc. Tom Daly, chief technology officer at Dyn, said the incident was not the result of a security failure on its services. Daly said it appears someone changed Twitter's DNS records to point visitors to a different Internet address using the proper account credentials assigned to Twitter (image above courtesy Trend Micro).
"Someone logged in who purported to be a legitimate user of their [DNS] platform account and started making changes," Daly said. "It was not a failing on our systems whatsoever."
Daly told Security Fix that the redirection lasted about 90 minutes.
"We had seen some interesting activity coming in, and said 'Hmm, there's something going on here,'" Daly said. "As soon as we detected what the issue was, we snapped into action and contacted Twitter."
It remains unclear how the user name and password needed to change Twitter's DNS records were intercepted. There are a number of possible explanations, but perhaps the most likely is that a Twitter administrator with authorized access to those credentials had his or her e-mail account hijacked. Security Fix will update this post in the event that more information becomes available.
By Brian Krebs | December 18, 2009; 2:00 PM ET
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