Social networking site Twitter was hacked and its main pages defaced for about an hour late Dec. 17.
Between about 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Pacific time, Twitter was replaced by a black background page showing a green flag with headline that read, in English: “Iranian Cyber Army … This Website Has Been Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”
The first indications that site was defaced were reported to TechCrunch as being around 10 p.m. Pacific time. The Twitter site came back online at slightly after 11 p.m.
Other Twitter sites, such as Blog.twitter.com and Status.Twitter.com, were still out of commission at 11:15 p.m., after the home page came back up.
On the flag were superimposed words in Farsi. The entire message read:
“Iranian Cyber ArmyTHIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMYiRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COMU.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.“
Twitter, like most social networking sites, has had to fight off its share of hackers. eWEEK security blogger Matt Hines has written extensively about this. His blog post takes an overall look at some of the problems Twitter has endured.
A Twitter staff member tweeted the following at about 11:50 p.m.: “Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We will update with more information soon.”
Here is a view of the hacked page.