News: Web Hosting Sales and Promos Roundup - Sept. 4, 2010
News: Google to Pursue Wave as a Complete Open-Source Collaboration Application
News: Equinix Expands Tokyo Data Center TY2
News: European DataCentre Expo to be Held in Germany
News: Bay-Area Digital Realty Trust Data Centers Save $6 to 10M in Power Costs Annually
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As has been reported in a variety of sources today, the popular social networking site Twitter was hacked yesterday, apparently by a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army.”
The site reportedly was unreachable starting at about 10:00 p.m. Thursday, for a period that lasted almost an hour.
Multiple reports have identified the nature of the attack as being against Twitter’s DNS records, rather than against the service’s own infrastructure. The DNS entry, reportedly hosted at traffic management service DYN (www.dyn.com) was compromised, and redirected to a site most likely hosted on a free account.
The landing page of the site users were redirected to featured a message reading “this site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”
In a TechCrunch post providing a fairly exhaustive investigation into the hack, Nic Cubrilovic says, citing both public accounts and “people within the underground security scene,” that the group is said to be working with the Iranian government. As part of an example, he mentions that the online attack was timed to coincide with several moves by Iran, including an escalation of diplomatic hostilities toward the US and EU and a move by Iranian troops into a disputed border area.
A major catalyst for Twitter’s rise to prominence this year was the disputed election in Iran, and the use of Twitter (along with YouTube and several other online resources) as a tool for disseminating information – during the election and the mass protests that followed, many traditional media resources were unsuccessful in providing a reliable picture of the situation.
Cubrilovic reports that the password reset function at DYN was used by attackers to gain access to Twitter’s DNS records and redirect them to the defacement site.
A big part of the discussion around the defacement has to do with the fact that Twitter has somewhat notoriously faced several other hacks in the last year. In the case of a recent mass hack of Twitter’s corporate email accounts, the vulnerability seemed to exist not in the site’s infrastructure security, but in the basic password security of email and administration accounts.
Thursday’s hack was reportedly rectified within the space of approximately an hour. The good news for Twitter is that the direct of security breaches like this on individual Twitter users is minimal, and that the general population of Twitter users does not appear to be particularly conscious of this kind of issue.
 |
PREVIOUS: University Data Center to Use Waste Heat to Warm Greenhouse | | | NEXT: Web Hosting Sales and Promos Roundup - Dec 18, 2009 |  |
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
July 2010 - What's Next? Forecasting Hosting's Future
Technically, there's nothing new about us posing the question, "what are the next steps hosting providers must take to capitalize on the opportunities available in the business?" From the 10,000-foot view, that's the basic premise that underlies just about everything the WHIR publishes or produces. In this particular case, however, we're looking at it through an extremely significant contextual lens. That is, for much of the last two years, hosting providers have been operating in a business climate defined by an economy in crisis.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
March 2010 - Web Hosting in Europe
Europe cuts an interesting figure in our coverage of the web hosting industry. From a purely news standpoint, it is very possible to treat Europe in more or less the same way that we treat North America - that is, report the facts, ask the right questions, try to anticipate the issues raised. From an analytical standpoint, however, we present a distinctly North American point of view - this being the product of circumstances (our location), rather than a bias.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
January 2010 - Hottest Hosts Directory
In 2008, in our inaugural Hottest Hosts guide, I wrote that we were exploring a new format with the first in-print directory of web hosting services. And last year, I discussed the project in the context of an ongoing project, and a growing tradition here at the Web Host Industry Review. The objective, however, is not to repeat ourselves, but to help the directory evolve into a more valuable resource - something that's going to help you with your purchasing decisions, and something you're going to hold on to for the duration of the year.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 01, 2010
Our site http://get-website-hosting.com suffered from a similar attack. Fortunately we were able to discover it quickly and we were able to prevent more damage.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 01, 2010
Website hosting is full of dangers. Webmasters should do much more about their own security. For example, never store passwords on your computer. Just write them down on a paper.