Twitter DNS Hacked

Twitter says that its DNS records were compromised.

If the screenshots are indication, someone got past Twitter’s defenses. The apparent organization responsible is the “Iranian Cyber Army.”

Here’s what we know: Last night, Twitter was changed to the screenshot above.  Not long after this, Twitter and the status blog were taken down.

For one of the world’s most popular websites to be compromised and taken down, even for a few minutes, is a big problem. This type of thing should never happen, regardless of who is to blame.

Even if it was a 3rd party DNS attack, Twitter still gets the black eye.

This is unacceptable for one of the world’s top 20 most visited websites. There needs to be accountability for this situation (no matter if it’s within Twitter or within a third party), and a more detailed explanation is warranted. Twitter also needs to find a way to assure that this never happens again.

DNS (domain Name System) is the system that translates names into IP addresses.
When you type in http://www.americanpeoplesearch.com , for example, your computer does a DNS lookup to get the IP Address for that domain.  Then your Browser sends the the request to the http port on that IP address.

What appears to have happened here, is that Twitter itself was not hacked, the DNS provider’s name server was.  So, when you typed in http://www.twitter.com , you were not sent to Twitter’s IP Address, but to a different one with the screenshot avove in it.