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Twitter down; hacked by "Iranian cyber army"?
- white_eskimo 17y agothis will definitely be interesting to see how it unfolds. Does anyone know if the SMS messaging infrastructure is still working? Is this just limited to the Web interface? Is api.twitter.com still up? I'll be watching http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk?pli=... for interesting comments
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- nose 17y agoAll of their web APIs are down (for me).
- dimarco 17y agoI laughed when I read this article was retweeted 7 times.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- RK 17y agohttp://istwitterdown.com/ http://istwitterdown.com/
- mhartl 17y agohttp://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/twitter.com http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/twitter.com
- oscardelben 17y ago#fail, it says no but should say yes
- tibbon 17y agoWell, the site isn't running tests to see if the site that we think of as twitter is up, just is something responding at that web address- which if you're seeing the iranian thing, then it is. Looks like Twitter just took down the entire front page though. Going to be a late night in California...
- oscardelben 17y agoExcept that when I ran the test the site was not responding, and many other services like http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ was telling me that the website was down for everybody.
- est 17y agometa: http://isistwitterdowndown.com/ http://isistwitterdowndown.com/
- andreyf 17y agoAPI is down, as well. Looks like this isn't just the front page/web layer. Twitter need to really step up: I can't imagine this is something that couldn't have been prevented by paying for some security analysis. Considering their total $155M of funding, I'm shocked this wasn't done. Between their continuing difficulty scaling, their private documents leak, and now this, twitter really needs to get their act together.
- spicyj 17y agoI wouldn't be surprised if Twitter intentionally disconnected their servers after discovering the defacement, rather than the hackers having actually gained access to the whole API layer.
- seldo 17y agoYeah, if I found my boxes had been so totally owned that they could serve arbitrary content I'd take everything down to protect customers, at least in the very short term. Poor Twitter ops; I'm sure they're having a great evening.
- mhartl 17y agoI'm pretty sure you meant "had been so totally pwned". This is the most serious, total pwnage I've ever seen on the tubes.
- blantonl 17y agoExactly, in a case like this I'd be pulling Ethernet cables and decomposing the issue without the rest of the Internet seeing the carnage. Regardless, this is bad.
- pmorici 17y agoI don't know how many servers twitter has but common sense dictates it's more than would be practical to pull Ethernet cables from in any reasonable amount of time.
- vaksel 17y agofirst they hacked our drones, now they hacked twitter...is Google next? Can you even fathom Google getting hacked.
- seldo 17y agoTo be fair, it's not clear how hard it is to hack twitter. The site falls over all the time all by itself. Granted, they briefly managed to serve some content as twitter, so it does look like a genuine hack rather than merely a DDoS or something. [edit] TechCrunch is reporting it's a DNS redirection attack, so their machines were probably never compromised (your password is safe). It also probably means the site will not be back up for a while, as it will take time for the DNS to propagate everywhere even after they fix it. [edit 2] ...aaaand it came back up 3 seconds later.
- rglullis 17y agoI don't think we can claim that "our passwords are safe". What about twitter clients that store your password to fetch your tweets automatically? Wouldn't they be posting your account password to http://twitter.com http://twitter.com, or twitter only uses HTTPS? If there is any way to login using standard HTTP, the same server that is used to deface the website can be collecting tons of user credentials. And even if twitter uses only HTTPS, what's the policy of twitter clients in regard to bad certificates?
- mahmud 17y agofirst they hacked our drones, now they hacked twitter Who is "they"? the drones were hacked by Taliban, twitter by the Iranian Cyber Army.
- waterlesscloud 17y agoThe good news for Twitter is that I keep wanting to go to Twitter to get the latest news on this hacking. They're my go-to source for breaking news.
- seldo 17y agoYeah, I have no idea how to tell my friends what's going on or find out if they've heard anything without twitter. I've taken to randomly IMing people.
- instcode 17y agoI suggest that you should let them know "Twitter got hacked" via http://identi.ca http://identi.ca next time ;-)
- trezor 17y agoFor me it's the exact opposite. If I use twitter I can assume by default it will be checked less frequently than email, so this would be the slowest way to get my message across, if gets across at all.
- moron4hire 17y agoThat's kind of sad. You can't call people? You can't email them?
- techiferous 17y ago"call" people? What do you mean? I thought you could only call methods.
- nose 17y agoHm, the twitter api wiki has a different opinion http://apiwiki.twitter.com/FAQ#IstheTwitterAPIdown http://apiwiki.twitter.com/FAQ#IstheTwitterAPIdown "Is the Twitter API down? Not likely: Twitter hasn't had more than a couple minutes of downtime in a while. Requests may lag from time to time, but chances are pretty good we're not down."
- naz 17y agohttp://search.twitter.com http://search.twitter.com is still up
- seymores 17y agoScreenshots. http://shitmores.blogspot.com/2009/12/twitter-got-hacked.html http://shitmores.blogspot.com/2009/12/twitter-got-hacked.htm...
- mahmud 17y agoThe Google index isn't rebuilt in real time. There was a higher frequency for the phrase "indian cyber army" before this incident.
- drusenko 17y agoInteresting to note that the favicon is still there. If it was a DNS attack, you would assume it wouldn't be there (unless the attackers put it on their box, which seems not very likely). Given that and the speed at which the service recovered, I'm going to say it does not seem like a DNS attack.
- rglullis 17y agoCouldn't the favicon be there just because it was previously cached in the browser?
- drusenko 17y agoVery possibly. But AFAIR IE is the only notoriously favicon caching browser, the rest of them do a good job of updating it often. And the favicon is showing up in multiple screenshots on both FF and Chrome.
- riffraff 17y agoIIRC twitter images are served from S3, so probably just a different dns?
- tibbon 17y agoGoogle seems to think that it was someone else according to their Search: http://i.imgur.com/xDTET.png http://i.imgur.com/xDTET.png (Iranian Cyber Army -> Indian Cyber Army)
- bugs 17y agoFor all the money invested in twitter and all the people backing it you would think it would have high enough security measures that this couldn't happen. Or at the very least they would be monitoring for such intrusions and be able to stop them quickly.
- borism 17y agoSecurity is expensive. How long did this last anyway?
- mahmud 17y agoMy Farsi sucks (non-existent) but I can understand the text at the bottom of the following image to mean: "This is a warning to the United States for interfering with our internal matters". The rest is an scripture quote ("The partisans of God shall prevail", or literally, "Hezbollah will win" ;-) and what seems like a stanza from a nationalist poem. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_xpwq_Sv0p98/SysgktMZ9fI/AAAAAAAAAqs/KSoRyYO5WuM/s1600-h/Screen+shot+2009-12-18+at+2.22.23+PM.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_xpwq_Sv0p98/SysgktMZ9fI/AAAAAAAAAq...
- gluegadget 17y agoIt actually reads: In the name of God. I, as an Iranian, hack (deface) this website in response to the wrongdoings of this service provider which are commanded by U.S governors.
- mahmud 17y agoI am only an Arabic speaker, this what I see "Banam Khuda Beh Inwan Eik Irani dur basikh dakhalat hai shatanat Aamiz ai sarwis dahunda beh dastur maqat Amrika'i dur amur dakhili kashrum. Aain sait beh `inwan hashadir hek ma shod" I just parsed out whatever that seemed most Arabic-like; and that is "Amrika dur amur dakhili" ;-)
- seldo 17y agoAs of 11.06pm, it's back for me.
- niyazpk 17y agoI think they are up again. It is working for me at least.
- dc2k08 17y agomawjcamp.org is an Iranian reformist website based outside of Iran.
- bilbo0s 17y agoYou know, this is just a thought, but this may have nothing to do with Iran at its root. Intellectual honesty requires me to admit that, I have absolutely no hard data to back this up, but please hear me out. Many people have been wondering, 'Hey, who are these DST guys that are continuously going long on Facebook at ridiculous valuations?' 'They even let employees at places like Facebook and Zynga cash out early!' 'Gosh, Russian businessmen must be nice.' Now if I had large sums of money that I wanted laundered, the method right up there at the top of my list is venture capital firm investing exclusively in overseas assets. Money is laundered via profitable exits on investments in foreign countries. In fact, strictly speaking, the exit does not even have to be profitable. Unless you are greedy. Which brings me back to Russian businessmen. Accusing anyone of anything is not the intention here, but a word of caution to Silicon Valley is in order. In Russia, business is a game played in somewhat less cordial a fashion. Also keep in mind that in Russia . . . you stab with a borrowed knife. I think we can expect many more attacks on Twitter. From hackers claiming to be 'Chinese', 'Iranian' or 'North Korean'.
- wheels 17y agoI'd put much higher odds on this being some disgruntled teen, who may or may not be Persian and may or may not be in Iran -- you know, like 99.9% of website defacements. Do you really think the focus of a cyber ops campaign or anti-competitive campaign would be ... to put a stupid message on Twitter's website? There are no doubt cyber ops teams in foreign (and domestic, naturally) intelligence, but they don't waste their time on shit like this.
- moron4hire 17y agoWell, #iranelection was the #1 most popular news topic on Twitter in 2009, according to their blog (http://blog.twitter.com/search/label/2009 http://blog.twitter.com/search/label/2009), so there is an actual motive available.
- alex_c 17y agoReddit comment suggesting it was a DNS hack: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ag0gn/twitter_has_been_hacked/c0hdy0s http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ag0gn/twitter_ha...
- tlrobinson 17y agoOfficial Twitter blog confirming it was a DNS hack: http://status.twitter.com/post/288586541/working-on-site-outage http://status.twitter.com/post/288586541/working-on-site-out... Of course, if their DNS was compromised, status.twitter.com could be compromised too...
- novum 17y agoCan we hire the Iranian Cyber Army to hack Facebook and restore some of the privacy controls?
- tlrobinson 17y agoIf it was indeed a DNS attack, Twitter is damn lucky it was just a defacement (assuming it was just a defacement). The attackers very easily could have phished anyone who logged in on twitter.com without https. Even worse, any Twitter client which used Basic Auth without SSL would silently be compromising people's passwords when they auto-refreshed.
- tlrobinson 17y agoOn second thought, http://blog.twitter.com/2009/12/dns-disruption.html http://blog.twitter.com/2009/12/dns-disruption.html says twitter.com was redirected, yet the API still worked. Since the API uses the twitter.com domain name, unless I'm missing something the only way that's possible is if the API was being man-in-the-middled. Something doesn't add up.
- timdorr 17y agoProbably cached DNS. A lot of providers extend the TTL, despite what you have it set at.
- randallsquared 17y agoA lot of providers extend the TTL, despite what you have it set at. ...which is very annoying when you're moving a business site. :/
- jrockway 17y agoIndeed. But the user's ISP is the problem, so technically you are not to blame.
- randallsquared 17y agoTechnically true, but it doesn't stop my client from being upset that their user claims my client's site is down. :)
- kwamenum86 17y agoCan we all comfortably step off of the Twitter bandwagon now that it has lost momentum? I promise, nobody will get hurt.
- sree_nair 17y agoWhy do you say the Twitter Bandwagon has lost mometum?.
- riffraff 17y agocompete, quantcast and alexa http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/ http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com but with all the new deals they got, they are probably going to restart growing soon. And of course there are lies, damn lies and web-statistics-selling companies.
- lucifer 17y agoIf it was a DNS attack and redirect, then what was the redirected IP?
- dhughes 17y agoI liked the "take care" part at the end.
- ddbb 17y agoSome details in here too: http://blog.sucuri.net/2009/12/twitter-defacement.html http://blog.sucuri.net/2009/12/twitter-defacement.html
- Calamitous 17y agoBecause the best way to destroy the Great Satan is to keep people from reading about what I ate for breakfast.
- ivankirigin 17y agoComments like yours are just so tired. Not only does the stream of seemingly trivial information accumulate into an intimate portrait of the lives of your friends, but twitter, facebook, and other services were used to straight up protest a sham election in a totalitarian state. What the fuck else do you want to see twitter do before you think twice about one line joke comments that hurt this community?
- Calamitous 17y agoReally, the one-liners are a reaction to the inflated importance people assign to a service which, to my best knowledge, doesn't even have any real plan to make a sustainable amount of money. Would a serious cyber-terrorist really choose Twitter to establish themselves as a credible threat? I'd argue that the lampooning of such breathless awe, far from being some malevolent outside influence which is "hurting" the community, is a part of the community.
- ivankirigin 17y agoSorry, your comment wasn't witty or original. Sniping, contentless comments don't belong here, and I'm surprised you're even disagreeing. It's plain to see your comment wasn't additive. Twitter is making many millions from their search deals. They may not be worth a billion dollars, but I'd bet with the current business configuration, they could become profitable if they focused on it. What part of "we're focusing on product and growth, not on making money" is hard to understand? Do you not believe them? Think they're actually pushing out ad sales and content licensing as hard as they can? Or, more likely, you're just ignorant of how their business is actually run. Ignorance is actually a generous term - you might know they're already making money and willfully ignore it. I actually agree that twitter's image is inflated. But the US government was the first to make a move here. They didn't ask facebook to try to stay up (they didn't need to). I think this response by cyber terrorists (if it isn't some teenage in ohio) is rational. It isn't what you were saying that I reacted to particularly, but how you said it. It would be the equivalent to my just responding "you're obviously an idiot who doesn't know anything about twitter".
- wendroid 17y agoTwitter search is now broken "Older tweets are temporarily unavailable." where older seems to be > 8 days