You know, this is just a thought, but this may have nothing to do with Iran at its root. Intellectual honesty requires me to admit that, I have absolutely no hard data to back this up, but please hear me out.
Many people have been wondering, 'Hey, who are these DST guys that are continuously going long on Facebook at ridiculous valuations?'
'They even let employees at places like Facebook and Zynga cash out early!'
'Gosh, Russian businessmen must be nice.'
Now if I had large sums of money that I wanted laundered, the method right up there at the top of my list is venture capital firm investing exclusively in overseas assets. Money is laundered via profitable exits on investments in foreign countries. In fact, strictly speaking, the exit does not even have to be profitable.
Unless you are greedy.
Which brings me back to Russian businessmen. Accusing anyone of anything is not the intention here, but a word of caution to Silicon Valley is in order. In Russia, business is a game played in somewhat less cordial a fashion. Also keep in mind that in Russia . . . you stab with a borrowed knife.
I think we can expect many more attacks on Twitter. From hackers claiming to be 'Chinese', 'Iranian' or 'North Korean'.
I'd put much higher odds on this being some disgruntled teen, who may or may not be Persian and may or may not be in Iran -- you know, like 99.9% of website defacements.
Do you really think the focus of a cyber ops campaign or anti-competitive campaign would be ... to put a stupid message on Twitter's website? There are no doubt cyber ops teams in foreign (and domestic, naturally) intelligence, but they don't waste their time on shit like this.
Well, #iranelection was the #1 most popular news topic on Twitter in 2009, according to their blog (http://blog.twitter.com/search/label/2009), so there is an actual motive available.
Regardless of the presence of motive, the execution (i.e. juvenile website defacement) doesn't exactly imply high-level cyber ops. And an easily fixed DNS hijack isn't really going to "take twitter out of commission" or whatever the purpose of this supposed cyber attack would be.
