Micro-blogging site Twitter suffered from yet another security breach after a group of Iranian hackers brought the site down last week in protest at US foreign policy.
A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army exploited a flaw in the site’s DNS (Domain Name System) to hack into the service last week, redirecting the URL ‘twitter.com’ to a site containing messages that oppose US interference in the country’s politics. The group also claims to support the party of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, which has challenged presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected despite much controversy in June.
Part of the message read: “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.”
One of the most notable periods of Twitter’s short history occurred during the Iranian elections when, with media communications severely restricted by the Iranian government, protesters, particularly those in the capital Tehran, used Twitter to express their views during the election period. Due to state media restrictions, content from Twitter was one of the primary sources for Western media outlets covering the Iranian election.
At the time of the election, Twitter was scheduled to undergo maintenance that would have made the service inaccessible but intervention from the US government ensured that the site remained live.
Twitter managed to reinstate the service later that day.
“Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed,” said Twitter co-founder founder Biz Stone in a blog post. “As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully.”
