‘Iranian Cyber Army’ Briefly Shuts Down Twitter

The popular microblogging site Twitter was briefly shut down overnight, its home page replaced with an image claiming the site had been hacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army.”

The Web site’s official blog acknowledged the disruption but gave no details as to how the site had been disrupted and who was responsible.

“As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed,” the site’s co-founder, Biz Stone, wrote on the blog.

“We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully,” he added.

Technology blogs including TechCrunch said Twitter went down for about an hour in the early hours Friday, US time.

Visitors to the site at that time reached a page with an image of a green flag under red text reading “Iranian Cyber Army” and “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”

Screengrabs posted on Flickr clearly showed additional text below the image in English.

“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,” the text said.

“NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST. Take Care,” it read.

TechCrunch reported that the disruption also affected Google searches for Twitter. It posted a screengrab showing that searches for a time returned a result reading “This Web Site Has Been Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,” above Farsi script.

TechCrunch translated the text as saying that it was a reaction to Twitter’s interference in the internal affairs of “my country,” which it said the authorities in the United States had ordered.

Iranian demonstrators protesting the results of June presidential elections used Twitter extensively, both to organize marches and to release information about their movement.

Their use of the microblogging site led some to dub the pro-democracy action against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “Twitter revolution” and made the Iranian election one of the top “trends” on the site this year. AFP