Do you remember the Twitter outage in December of 2009? Well, Twitter has had many outages so you may not even have noticed it, but this was quite apparent because it actually replaced Twitter’s home page. What if I told you that their servers (the computers that actually hosted the site) did not get hacked even to all outside appearances, it did?

It is true. What really happened is a case of DNS hijacking. Now, I am not sure where you are, but if you have set up a couple of websites before, you know that at some point in time, one of the steps you do is to change your domain’s DNS settings. That way instead of a ‘Can’t find site’ screen, people see your web site.  In essence, you are connecting/linking up your domain with the computer that hosts your web site. This connection can be changed at any time if you have access to change it. It is a lot like a forwarding address. If you move a lot, you may decide to use one of those mailbox services so that your address stays constant but your real address changes as you move. Incidentally, that’s how some web design companies hold their customers’ domains hostage when the customer switches hosts. And that’s another story.

Back to DNS hijacking. Knowing this, if a hacker can literally point your website or anyone’s website (how about whitehouse.gov) to their own site or some other compromised site where they can unleash a boatload of hell on your systems, why not do that instead? I think it makes a ton of sense for them. And that’s what DNS hijacking is about. Twitter was one of the more prominent sites that have been hit but there are countless more unfortunately, our servers have not been spared either.

You know what is bad about this? As a website owner, there is little to nothing you can do because the hijacking often takes place in an area beyond our reach – like your web hosts’ upstream. This is not something you have access to 🙁 But I guess you can look at it in a way that you have help to deal with it. No matter what, changing passwords is always a good thing.

Image courtesy of John evans