Iran hacker attack on Twitter shows risks of political cyberpranking

It’s difficult to imagine that some hackers claiming to represent Iran managed to seize control of twitter.com. With its 23 million monthly visitors, just imagine if the Iranians took town Target.com (26m) or CNN.com (21m). That’s the colossal level of epic fail that Twitter losing control of its domain name represents.

In the course of the story, Michael Arrington at Techcrunch mentioned the following:

There is a history between Iran and Twitter. It was well noted and covered in the media that Twitter was used as a tool during the Iranian election protests. The US government actually intervened to assure that Twitter was available to the protestors in Tehran and around the country. This attack may be an act of reprisal from groups who were not happy with the role that Twitter played during the protests.

via Twitter Hacked, Defaced By “Iranian Cyber Army”.

This reaches back to my warnings this summer when blogger activists were encouraging people to launch distributed denial of service attacks against websites affiliated with the Iranian government – URLs like supremeleader.ir and ahmadinejad.ir. They succeeded in overwhelming some websites that hundreds or thousands of people visit a month. The people involved in these crass tantrums of activism even went and ran victory laps as Iranian authorities continued to bust heads and arrest protesters, some of whom were tortured in Iranian jails and may ultimately face execution at the hands of their thuggish regime.

In contrast, to the merry wanna-be cyber-activists who brought down President Ahmadinejad’s blog, the hackers who attacked Twitter took over a website that is visited by 23 million people a month, giving a photo like this for all of them to read:

So, let’s say the US intelligence community investigates this act of cyber-crime and finds that the hackers who broke Twitter were linked in some way to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. What in the world can we ever do about it?

During the Cold War, Americans fastidiously criticized the Soviets for blocking radio transmissions via Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. We were for free speech and open expression, and saw the idea of jamming radio transmissions as anathema to our way of life.

But when Iranians were struggling to speak freely against the election-stealing thugs who had consolidated power over their government, Americans sitting at their laptops were jamming up their websites. So if we go before the international community and criticize Iran for hacking one of our nation’s favorite websites, the response in Farsi will be, “Your people did it first.” And this time, they’ll actually kind of be right.

So please, next time around, when heads are being split by batons on the streets of Tehran, please don’t attack Iranian government websites. You’re only hurting America’s soft power when you do so.