Making the news rounds is a story of how Twitter was hacked by the "Iranian Cyber Army" for a while. Of course, this really only affected Twitter addicts and the news, who need to find something to talk about.

The message they put out there was pretty pathetic (from a world-domination standpoint) and just plain bad English. I didn't see the site, but here's what I found on another site:

Iranian Cyber Army

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

[email protected]

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….

NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;)
Take Care.

It makes me wonder what these script kiddies are hoping to accomplish. Although I'm taking some time to wax moronic about it, there's nothing really spectacular that went on with this attack.

First, the feat was not taking over Twitter, so no real geek points from me. Instead they disrupted the DNS for a short while, which in reality only affected people who were on systems whose caches were in need of updating (which may be why some of us didn't notice). For this case, think of DNS as that kindly clerk at the gas station for directions somewhere. In this easy example, these hoodlums intercepted and directed you to the wrong someplace. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this, and none of the articles I've read speculated how they did it, so neither will I.

Second, their message was a little whiney and, as the elipsis indicates, incomplete. Perhaps there's a lot more behind the propaganda they're getting about how bad the US is, or perhaps there's a lot of filtering of what I get about how the Internet works (not that those two concepts are at all opposites or exclusive of one another), but it seems to me that bugging one website on the Internet is not going to terribly affect the US as a whole.

Sure, lots of people talk about Twitter like it's the be-all-end-all of the Internet, but really, it isn't. I know more people who don't use it than do. Sure, I ping on it (this blog post will automagically appear there), but just to dork around, not because I think I've got anything special going.

I guess they're protesting some trade embargo? Because the Internet started in the US, and many of its backbones and a huge number of websites are served from whithin its borders, there's an apparent parallel between the US and the Internet? Because of the attack on Twitter, now we've been warned?

If hackers really want to take advantage of Twitter, what they'd do is use it to replace the aging and failing IRC services that they've been doing for ages. Make a twitter account, have the bots monitor the Twitter accounts, and publish bot-driving tweets to tell the bots to do their stuff. Take the monster and use it for your cause.

Oh, wait...did I just give away some kingdom keys. Sheesh.