Twitter, NYTimes and Huff Po Whois and DNS records altered, Syrian Electronic Army takes responsibility

At approximately 3pm PST, the Syrian Electronic Army seemingly hacked into Twitter, Huffington Post and NY Times’ registry accounts altering contact details, and more significantly, DNS records. Modifying DNS records of a domain will allow SEA to redirect visitors to any site of their choosing.

Contact details for the Twitter.com domain were changed, but it’s reasonable to assume that if the SEA had the ability to change contact information, they may very well have had the ability to change DNS records and point the Twitter.com domain elsewhere, redirecting visitors and users.

The SEA also altered the DNS records for twimg.com which Twitter uses for virtually all CSS, JS, images, cookies and more. This means for many users, Twitter.com wouldn’t load correctly and avatars were unavailable across many Twitter clients.

[Story via TNW]