21 December 2009

Internal security breach responsible for Twitter hack

Micro-blogging site Twitter restored service at 0700 GMT Saturday after a hack resulted in 80 per cent of users being redirected outside of their intended URLs for just over an hour.

Between 0546 and 0700 GMT Saturday users of the phenomenally popular miniblogging site found an unfamiliar greeting after logging on, encountering a protest site allegedly linked to Iran instead of the site's usual tweets. According to its blog, Twitter believes "the motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users - we don't believe any accounts were compromised"

The site also urges concerned users to contact them via email if potentially affected.

The group behind the attack - identified as the relatively unknown Iranian Cyber Army - reset DNS controls, redirecting to a page featuring their name and contact email along with a short, anti-US message. Twitter's DNS settings were compromised with valid credentials, according to a Wired magazine report.

Tom Daly, chief technology officer of Dyn, a DNS company servicing Twitter, in an interview with the magazine, said "the only credentials that were compromised were Twitter's," declining to comment further on the nature of the account infiltrated.

The sentiment behind the group's message suggested a rebellion against its perception of a US hegemony of the Internet, possibly inspired by Twitter's prominence during the hotly contested Iranian presidential elections this past summer. The Obama administration requested the website to delay maintenance to maintain the information stream from Iran.