NEW YORK, NY – The mighty Twtitter was brought down by a 17-year-old!

Twitter has certainly become the world’s most popular microblogging site. Tweets and Tweeted have become staples of our vocabulary and Twitter has made “being followed” a good thing. With its popularity and usage going through the roof, one would think that Twitter’s security precautions would be on point. So much so that a 17-year-old couldn’t make Twitter vulnerable to hackers. Or could he?

A 17-year-old Australian schoolboy said on Wednesday he unwittingly caused a massive hacker attack on Twitter which sent users to Japanese porn sites and took out the White House press secretary’s feed.

Pearce Delphin, whose Twitter name is @zzap, admitted exposing a security flaw which was then pounced upon by hackers, affecting thousands of users and causing havoc on the microblogging site for about five hours.

The teenager, who lives with his parents in Melbourne, said he tweeted a piece of “mouseover” JavaScript code which brings up a pop-up window when the user hovers their cursor over the message. But the idea was soon taken up by hackers who tweaked the code to redirect users to pornographic sites and create “worm” tweets that replicated every time they were read.

“I did it merely to see if it could be done … that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet,” Delphin told AFP via email.

“At the time posting the tweet, I had no idea it was going to take off how it did. I just hadn’t even considered it.”

NEW YORK, NY – Twitter was hacked last night by the supposed “Iranian Cyber Army”, as retaliation against the American government!

Twitter went down for about two hours Thursday night, when it was hacked and defaced by a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army”.

This was what the front page looked like:

This was the message the hackers left:

Iranian Cyber Army

NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST
Take Care.

At the same time, if users Googled to look for Twitter, this was the result:

It roughly translates to: “In the name of God, As an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter’s interference sly which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country…”

It is believed that the hackers are retaliating against Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests. Since Iranian and international users were using Twitter to get information in and out of the locked down country, the American government worked with Twitter to keep the service up and running. A planned 90-minute maintenance outage was delayed so that users could keep spreading news reports.

Twitter has briefly explained the attack last night, merely stating that their “DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed.” However, they have yet to address the frightening nature of the attack.

BLUE MOUNTAINS, OR – After a spate of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked, the world’s most famous cryptid became the next victim.

Weekly World News was able to screen-capture the fake update before it was deleted, which announced, “nessie is gay”.

A representative from Cryptids & Humanoids Alliance Against Defamation issued a statement on Bigfoot’s behalf this morning: “Bigfoot is embarrassed and infuriated at this identity theft. He wants to formally apologize to the Loch Ness Monster for any emotional distress this has caused, and reiterate that he has no opinion on the Monster’s sexuality.

“Bigfoot’s twitter followers know he would never write such a sophomoric attempt at humor. He asks that twitter find and prosecute this hacker to the fullest extent of the law.”

For Bigfoot’s usual twitter habits, read his last five updates:

ugh, avoiding stalkerazzi, never stop taking photos of me  9:47PM Jan 3rd, 2008 from web

ditched skunk ape cousin’s xmas dinner, total hillbilly!  7:03PM Dec 25th, 2008 from web

is it time for gossip girl yet?  5:38PM Dec 22nd, 2008 from web

burned myself trying to make a fire   10:02PM Dec 19th, 2008 from web

thinking about getting a cat, or a badger  11:17AM Dec 16th, 2008 from web