About Last Night's Twitter Hacking

This is old news now, you all know that Twitter has been hacked last night, and it's back to normal operation now.

Mashable reports that Twitter has been hacked by a group called the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’, which took over the microblogging site and added its own text; logos; and images to the site. via mediaupdate.co.za

In fact I wanted here to clarify some issues, as I've seen many twitter users so worried and some of them decided to change their passwords there. The point is, the so called 'Iranian Cyber Army' didn't crack twitter servers nor their database or anything, what they've done was just a DNS hijack. As you know each computer (server) on the internet is reachable via it's IP Address, and since we are too lazy to remember all those IP's, we reach servers via their Names, i.e. instead of typing http://168.143.162.36 we type http://twitter.com, and DNS servers are there to translate the twitter.com to 168.143.162.36 for us. Now what the hackers have done was that they hijacked the DNS servers and made it translate http://twitter.com to their own server's IP Address, and that's it. So, I believe no one was able to touch your password, and you are not supposed to be worried.



Now, let's do our non-Arabic speakers a favor and translate the banners for them.

What's written in blue there is as follows:
فإن حزب الله هم الغالبون
This is a phrase from the Holy Quraan, and it means "The party of God are the victorious ones", or "Those who belong to God are the victorious ones". By the way, the word "Party of God", is Hezbollah in Arabic, which gives the phrase another meaning, "Hezbollah are the victorious ones".
This phrase is part of an Ayah - i.e. verse - that calls people to obey God, Prophet Muhammad, and those who give money to the poor while praying - referring to Imam Ali. It then states that those who obeys them and belong to God will be victorious.
As you can see here, the whole Ayah has a special significance to the Shia, and may be that's why those Iranian Cyber Hackers decided to use it.

Now let's have a look at the phrase written in red on the green flag:
يا حسين
This is a phrase that means "Oh Hussain", or "Dear Hussain". Hussain is the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and he is also the son of Ali. Now let's have a look at our calendars. Today is the first day of the Islamic Hijry year, and it is also the first day of the ten days of Ashura, where the Shia remember the martyrdom of Al Hussain, and most probably this is why the flag was included in the banner.

So in brief, it seems to me that the ones who hacked twitter belongs to the Iranian system, or at least sympathize with it. And they used the religious slogans mentioned above to deliver a message to the internet users worldwide via twitter that the Iranian regime are the party of God, and they shall be victorious sooner or later.

Update: Oh wait a moment, they wrote some text there, "Now Which Country is embargo list? Iran? Usa?". So my guessings were right :)

Tags: Twitter, DNS, Iran, Islam, Gr33n Data