Iranian Cyber Army Takes Credit for Twitter DNS Hijacking Attack
The popular social networking and microblogging site Twitter succumbed to another attack which took the site offline for about an hour today.
Hackers who called themselves the Iranian Cyber Army somehow managed to take Twitter.com offline by changing the DNS records which redirected traffic to another site. During the hour that Twitter was unavailable to its users, visitors to Twitter.com were greeted with a web page that had a black background displaying an image of a green flag and Arabic writing. The site included a message that read: "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" with an attached email address.
Twitter, as all security researchers should know, has had well more than their fair share of attacks from hackers and cybercrooks not only in the recent months but past years time. The culprits of the latest attack have not been confirmed as an "Iranian Cyber Army". Twitter is blaming the outage on changes made to their DNS records which is suppose to match the company’s domain name and IP address of their servers.
A changed or manipulated DNS record, or Domain Name System, is a rather simple way for hackers to redirect all traffic of a specified web URL. The question is, how did the hackers gain access to Twitter’s DNS records? For now no one really knows. Twitter released an update in their status page that read:
"Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon."
According to Twitter's account of the attack, their servers were never compromised and the underlying issue rests with a targeted attack on the DNS service provider Dyn, which manages Twitter’s DNS records. Reports have stated that Twitter was only unavailable for about an hour during this attack.
Do you think Twitter outages and attacks have become second nature? If you are a user of Twitter, do you now expect occasional Twitter related issues such as the recent hacker attack? Did you know you can follow our 6 crucial tips to avoid malware on Twitter to safeguard yourself against hacker attacks on your personal Twitter account?