Hackers claiming to belong to the Iranian Cyber Army have
bought down the microblogging site Twitter.
The site, which was inaccessible for about an hour
starting around 10 pm last night was defaced with an a image appears to be
written in Farsi script and when translated to English it read:
“THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY,
.
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.” (Boy, am I glad I don't have to edit their stuff. sub.ed.)
British Flickr user Chris Hoare, from Leicester in
England spotted the screenshot before the site shut down. He said told
Cnet that the the HTML was pretty basic, and everything that
it showed was local on the server it was being sent from. It looked like the
whole thing was a DoS attack of some sort.
Security has been a problem for Twitter. In January, a
hacker hijacked CNN news man Rick Sanchez's feed and proclaimed the journalist
was "high on crack." Twitter users have also been the target of a
password-stealing phishing scam. Twitter and Iran also have a few problems after the
country's presidential election in June.
Protesters in Iran used Twitter to
skirt government filters to report events, express outrage, and get people out
to opposition rallies. As such the Iranian establishment would have a beef with
the outfit's continued existence.