So last night at about 10pm, Twitter was displaying a message that it had been hacked by the Iran Cyber Army. There was much speculation as to how Twitter got hacked, as Twitter.com was not functioning but some APIs and Tweets were working. It wasn’t until the status page updated that we found out exactly what happened. Apparently, Twitter’s DNS was compromised, but what does that mean?

Basically it means that someone changed the location of where your computer, and every computer in the world for that matter, (including google) was looking for twitter.

Copied From TechCrunch

DNS and propagation is not something I am going to cover in depth here, but it will be covered more in depth in the History of the Internet Part 2.

A good analogy to understand what happened is this: Imagine someone walked up to you on the street and asked you and asked where the supermarket is. You, knowing where everything in your city is gladly provide them the address, and send them on their way. That is basically how DNS works for computers on the internet (this is very watered down but that is the basics). Now lets say you were less then honest, and decided to send that unsuspecting person that asked you for directions to the dirtiest bar in town, instead of the supermarket. That is essentially what happened with the Twitter’s DNS being “Compromised”. This means that the account data on twitter’s servers was not actually touched, and as far as we know right now, account passwords are safe.

Information above gathered from TechCrunch