US News

Twitter hacked by ‘Iranian Cyber Army’

Social media website Twitter was hacked late Thursday by a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army”, US tech blogs reported.

The hackers were said to have broken through Twitter’s defenses, taken over the website and uploaded their own logos and images to the site.

They changed the front page to one that read, “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”

The tech community in San Francisco reacted with shock to the major security breach.

“This is unacceptable for one of the world’s top 20 most visited websites,” wrote Ben Parr, blogger from Mashable.

“Nothing compares to what has happened tonight. Twitter was summarily hacked, taken over, and then taken down. Its security protocols were clearly ineffective.”

He added, “This is a black eye of epic proportions.”

Once the social networking site was back up, one topic dominated the conversation, as “#WhenTwitterWasDown” and “Iranian Cyber Army” quickly became the two most mentioned phrases on the network.

An official message from Twitter on Friday said, “Twitter’s (Domain Name System) records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We will update with more information soon.”

The Domain Name System, or DNS, is the internet service that ties a domain name to its web servers. By changing these records, hackers would have been able to redirect visitors to Twitter.com to their own servers.

This could have enabled them to collect Twitter usernames and passwords by using a spoof website, but instead they appear to have used the opportunity for political ends.

Last summer, Twitter was heralded as a tool that allowed opposition voices to be heard from Iran during a major crackdown following the disputed presidential election.

(This article is provided by NewsCore, which aggregates news from around News Corporation.)