Twitter Hack
On December 17, 2009, Twitter was attacked. Users attempting to post their pearls of wisdom and obligatory breakfast food observations met an ominous greeting instead. A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army took credit for the hack, which was later discovered to be a DNS exploit designed to redirect users from Twitter.com to a page with this message: "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army. 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." The hijack, a careful sabotage of the server that links the Twitter domain name to an IP address, changed Twitter's DNS records to an IP address that lead to the Iranian Cyber Army message page. Digitally, relations between the U.S. and the Iranian government had been tense since the country's last election six months prior — in which Twitter played an integral role — which led the media to believe the group was actually affiliated with the Iranian protesters. In an effort to aid the uprising, the Obama Administration convinced Twitter to delay censoring the message, before it was eventually found to be a fake.