Around 10pm PST on Thursday night, Twitter suffered a DNS attack. While all third-party applications worked swimmingly, Twitter.com temporarily redirected to a site which displayed the following message:

 

Of course, nobody knows for sure who this "Iranian Cyber Army" is, but the message certainly raises some eyebrows--Twitter stole the limelight over the summer for becoming one of the most popular online services Iranian protesters could use to organize demonstrations against what they believed to be a dishonest presidential election.

Almost two hours after the site came back online, Twitter posted an official update:

As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed. As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we've investigated more fully.

Weirdly enough, at 1am PST, the same enigmatic Iranian Cyber Army posting remained online at another site, http://www.mowjcamp.org, whose original state is unknown at this time.

Whoever this "army" is, their ability to take down Twitter so comprehensively and for so long does not reflect so much on their skill as it does on the poor quality of Twitter's security. The site is not unfamiliar with frequent down-times and even security issues similar to this have occurred in the past. But last night's complete takedown of Twitter.com is the worst sign of sloppy security yet.

Hopefully, Twitter will give us a more substantial news update shortly.