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Iranian Cyber Army Attack Twitter

Twitterers were today left with nowhere to tweet, when the site was down. Twitter has been attacked by the Iranian Cyber Army, an unknown hacker group. 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. DNS is a vital component of how the internet works. 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. It is simply mapping a web address 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 down for nearly an hour, whilst frantic meetings were probably being held at Twitter HQ.

These hackers might be unknown but they knew the weak spot. 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 it looks like we just lost a few tweets, but it could have been much worse. What if this attack had a criminal intent rather than a political one. 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? What sort of identity theft possibilities are here? 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