The Twitterers of the World were left with nowhere with to tweet today. The truth is that Twitter had been attacked by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army. But the interesting fact was they achieved this without actually directly attacking the Twitter servers.

The twitter hack was actually a DNS based attack, it was their DNS record which were targeted. The internet relies on DNS to make it work. When you type a web address into your browser, then it is DNS which is responsible for find the address of the correct web site and directing you there. It is simply mapping a web address to an IP address.

So in this case it looks like the Iranian Cyber Army changed the Twitter DNS records to point at a different server where they put up a cheesy political message. Whilst frantic meetings in Twitter HQ probably were happening, the site was down for nearly an hour.

The hackers had done their homework here that’s for sure. DNS is one of the weak points of most web sites, Google have been through this experience too and many more will definitely follow. It is all very well having a super secure hacker proof server, but if your DNS records are changed nobody will ever get to your site.

Thankfully in this case all that we got was a few lost tweets, but it could have been much worse. Imagine if this attack had been based with criminal rather than political intent. The directed page could have been changed to the Twitter logon page, stealing accounts. How many accounts could have been stolen in an hour? The possibilities for Identity theft are numerous? I’ll bet you many of these Twitter logons will also be used to login to banks, shop accounts etc.

I don’t use Twitter but I’ll tell you what, if I did I’d be rapidly changing my passwords anyway. Your online identity is valuable take care of it, more information here – surfing anonymously