On Thursday night for a couple of hours Twitter was under the command of the Iranian Cyber Army. The popular micro-blogging website suffered a cyber-attack which rendered its services useless to 80 per cent of its users. Rather than the chirpy birdie (indicating business-as-usual) or the fail whale (when the server experiences errors) users were directed to a black menacing page with a green flag and the following message,USA think they controlling and managing Internet by their access but they dont,we control and manage internet by our power. Over the past year one of the many contributions of Twitter has been to openly document the calls for change and reform in Iran. It was then the world recognised the potential of Twitter that it was not just a site for social interaction but it could serve as a portal to the free flow of information. As the number of users has increased over the past year by 500 per cent the security component of the laid-back San Francisco company has been slow to adjust. This can be seen in the politically motivated attack on Twitter in August aimed at a blogger who spoke out against Russia in favour of the Republic of Georgia. Though many other social networking sites were targeted,it was only Twitter that could not withstand the attack. This is really not just about Twitter. The freedom of information promised by the internet has transforming capabilities it can free a society but it too can transfer the same battles between free speech and those attempting to curtail it to another arena. As ever more people embrace this openness it comes at a cost; information is only as secure as a password and it is the responsibility of the site to ensure security.
