Saturday, December 19, 2009

Twitter hacked, attacker claims Iran link


A computer hacker briefly hijacked Twitter.com on Thursday, redirecting users to a website and claiming to represent a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army.

Twitter, which in June became a key communication channel for Iranian protesters disputing the country's election results, said it was disrupted for a little more than an hour.

Twitter's home page was replaced with one whose headline read "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" and an anti-American message.

"The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users," Twitter said on its blog. "We don't believe any accounts were compromised."moneycontrol

Security experts said it was the first time attackers have succeeded in hijacking a major social-networking website.

It was unlikely that the Iranian government was involved, despite its dislike of social networking sites and years of discord with the United States over its nuclear program, experts said.

A screen shot posted in a number of websites, including TechCrunch, shows the message written in red, set above a green flag. An e-mail sent to the address on the redirected Web page was returned.

The hacker or hackers got credentials to redirect Twitter's traffic to a bogus site, according to Dyn Inc, a company based in New Hampshire that directs that traffic for Twitter.

The attackers did not hijack accounts of the company's other customers, Dyn Vice President Kyle York said. "This was an isolated incident," he said.

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