Iranian Cyber Army Takes Down Twitter, Sort Of

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Late last night Twitter was apparently hacked by a group calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army. It turns out that it was merely a DNS exploit that redirected Twitter.com visitors to a page with the following message:

Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST
Take Care.

(More on Time.com: The Top 10 Everything of 2009: Tweets)

While the actual site wasn’t hacked into, this incident is just one of many in a long string of attacks on the popular social networking site. It’s unclear what motivated the group to attack the site, but ties between Twitter and Iran are nothing new. Twitter played an integral role during Iranian elections with the US government stepping in to ensure that the service would be available to all. The following message was being displayed for a short time when googling for Twitter:

“In the name of God, As an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter’s interference sly which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country…”

(More on Time.com: People Who Mattered in 2009: The Twitter Guys)

Was this an act of retaliation? Is Iran even involved? It remains to be seen.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7BcDbxY2Wk]

More on Time.com:

The 50 Best Inventions of 2009

Tech Buyer’s Guide 2009