Twitter is down! Fail Whale, Fail Whale!… Whenever Twitter is down, a holding page of a whale design appears that supposedly means that Twitter is facing large user-access capacity or on a scheduled/un-scheduled downtime. Yet, this time it was none of the mentioned.
Twitter reported in the morning that there is un-scheduled downtime and they are working on resolving it, but later it turned out to be a complete hack attack through DNS. The homepage replaced with an image claiming the site has been hacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army”.
Twitter team later confirms the disruption that on their official blog and promised to provide further details after they managed to bring it back live.
Visitor to Twitter.com homepage at that time reached a defaced black page with a green flag image and red text titled “Iranian Cyber Army” and sub-titled “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”
Additionally reading the following: U.S.A. thinks they are controlling and managing internet by their own, but they aren’t, we control and manage internet by our power, so do not try to stimulation Iranian people to it,” the text said.
Twitter has played an extensive role in Iranian presidential demonstrators protesting, whereby every protesters was a broadcaster by providing latest marches and information through twitter platform and applications; not to forget that Iranian election is one of the top trending topics of 2009 on Twitter.
Such a security hole in Twitter platform is definitely not acceptable, as Twitter is supposedly among top websites worldwide and among the most visiting social networks and yet not up to users’ security expectations.