Iranian Cyber Army and Twitter Hacked

Twitter Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,?:- Popular micro blogging Twitter was briefly shut down overnight, its home page replaced with an image claiming the site had been hacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army.”

Technology blogs including TechCrunch said Twitter went down around 0600 GMT for about an hour.

The website’s official blog acknowledged the disruption. “As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed,” the site’s co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the blog.

“We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully,” he added.

Visitors to the site at that time reached a page with an image of a green flag under red text reading “Iranian Cyber Army” and “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”

Screengrabs posted on Flickr clearly showed additional text below the image in English.

“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,” the text said.

“NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST. Take Care,” it read.

TechCrunch reported that the disruption also affected Google searches for Twitter. It posted a screengrab showing that searches for a time returned a result reading “This Web Site Has Been Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,” above Farsi script.

Iranian demonstrators protesting the results of June presidential elections used Twitter extensively, both to organize marches and to release information about their movement.

Their use of the microblogging site led some to dub the pro-democracy action against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “Twitter revolution” and made the Iranian election one of the top “trends” on the site this year.

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Iranian Cyber Army and Twitter Hacked was first posted on December 18, 2009 at 6:31 pm.

US trying to thin Taliban with jobs, cash offers

The United States and its allies are stepping up efforts to persuade Afghan insurgents to put down their arms by negotiating with representatives of Mullah Mohammed Omar and other Taliban commanders and offering cash and jobs to low-level fighters, according to Pakistani, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials and analysts, The Washington Times has reported.

The efforts, coupled with an increased U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, are meant to weaken the insurgency and promote a negotiated end to the region’s violence, the paper said. “The strategy is to peel away so many fighters” from the insurgent chiefs that they will be left like “floating icebergs and have no one left to command,” the paper quoted Kenneth Katzman, an Afghanistan specialist at the Congressional Research Service as saying.

A Western diplomat based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, who asked not to be named, confirmed that Pakistani and Saudi officials are using their “connections and influence within Afghan Taliban to elicit some meaningful way to end the deadlock,” the paper reported.

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US trying to thin Taliban with jobs, cash offers was first posted on December 18, 2009 at 6:53 pm.

Europe shudders under pre-Christmas cold snap

Travelers are facing severe transport disruption as Northwest Europe was hit by a cold snap and early snow.

The French capital and much of the north of the country awoke to find a seven-centimetre blanket of snow, which delayed flights from Charles de Gaulle airport by up to two hours.The iconic Eiffel Tower was closed to visitors, and train and bus services were delayed in many areas, as daytime temperatures dropped below zero for the first time in the year and black ice coated northern roads.
In Britain, traffic disruptions are expected as heavy snow falls across much of the UK, with south-east and north-east England worst affected. The Met Office issued severe warnings for heavy snowfall in London, south-east and east England, as well as north-east England and East Midlands. Up to 20cm of snow is possible in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, London and East Anglia, with gale-force winds causing drifts.

The northern Netherlands experienced the worst falls in four years, with snow up to 25 centimetres deep in places, the national weather service said, while all bus services in the region were cancelled. Numerous flights were cancelled and delayed at Brussels airport.

In Germany, temperatures dropped to around minus two in the capital and drivers had to take care on the roads as the snow fell. The German government’s weather service says that some 10 centimeters of snow fell in the hills outside the financial capital Frankfurt.

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Europe shudders under pre-Christmas cold snap was first posted on December 18, 2009 at 6:56 pm.