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Twitter’s DNS Records Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army

Twitter was hacked a few hours back and hackers who claim themselves as Iranian Cyber Army were able to carry out this attack by compromising Twitter’s DNS Records.

While Twitter has accepted that they had issue with their DNS records, no more details have officially been revealed.

How can someone hack Twitter’s DNS records and bring down the site?

Well, if you wish to understand how a compromised DNS can bring down you first need to understand What is a DNS and How does it work?. Once you have read about what a DNS is, you can also consider reading the effect of a DDos attack on a DNS and its effect on the website.

Well, so to cut the story short, DNS is the first step in getting connected to a website. Hackers can compromise your DNS server and modify the DNS records / zone file  of your domains to point to some other server. Seems like this is exactly what happened with twitter.

twitter-hacked-by-iranian-cyber-army

Once the DNS record was modified, instead of sending data to Twitter’s servers, the traffic started getting routed to the hacker’s servers from where the page ( image above) was served.

The issue is now resolved, but it will be interested to learn how and what went wrong at the DNS side. I did a quick dig and seems like Twitter’s DNS is managed by a third party.

twitter-dns-records

Interestingly, Iranian Elections was the most engaging topic on Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vaibhav1981

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Related posts:

  1. Iranian Cyber Army Hacks Baidu
  2. TechCrunch Hacked? (yes,Techcrunch got hacked)
  3. Iranian Election was the most engaging Twitter topic in 2009 ( Twitter Trends)
  4. DDoS Brings Down Twitter ( What is DDos Attack?)
  5. [Security] How a Distributed Denial of Service Attack on your DNS Server can bring down your Website

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Twitter, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Twitter’s DNS Records Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army”

  1. [...] Cyber Army Hacks Baidu Iranian Cyber Army which was involved in hijacking Twitter’s DNS records, is now in news again for hacking Baidu.com, China’s largest search engine. ( yes, in China, [...]

  2. [...] not yet clear, if this is a hijack attempt, as done previously by Iranian Cyber Army with Twitter and Baidu. However, from the looks of it, it appears to be a hack than a [...]

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