Dec 30 2009
Iranian hackers in Twitter Attack
Iranian Cyber Army Attack Twitter
Yep the world’s twitterers were lost with nowhere to tweet briefly today, when the site was down. The truth is that Twitter had been attacked by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army. 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. The internet relies on DNS to make it work. 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. The web address is simply being mapped 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 inaccessible for about an hour, whilst there were some very worried folk 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 in this case all that we got was a few lost tweets, but it could have been much worse. What if this attack had a criminal intent rather than a political one. The directed page could have been changed to the Twitter logon page, stealing accounts. How many accounts could have been stolen in an hour? The possibilities for Identity theft are numerous? 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