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Twitter.com after being hacked - Source: ONE News -
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Popular micro-blogging service Twitter was hacked on Friday evening (NZT).
Instead of seeing the site's usual homepage, people using Twitter were presented with a screen that said: "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army."
Twitter's regular homepage reappeared approximately an hour after it was taken over.
Twitter and Facebook both suffered service problems from hacker attacks in August, raising speculation of a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.
Motives for denial-of-service attacks usually range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that do not pay demanded fees, according to security experts.
Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, says Steve Gibson, the president of internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.
Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online "followers", is one of the fastest-growing internet companies.
The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June.
The aftermath of the Iran elections was the top Twitter trend for 2009. Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, the Iranian election surfaced repeatedly among Twitter users.
