Hackers and web design winners

21/12/09 posted by Liz Niland

Those pesky hackers have been at it again. Twitter was hacked in the early part of this weekend, reportedly via an email address with an easy-to-crack password. Basically creating a redirect to their own webpage, the hackers - the Iranian Cyber Army - were attempting to retaliate against the use of Twitter by Iranian citizens during recent unrest. 


The official word from Twitter is that their DNS (Domain Name System - it’s what turns an IP address into a domain name) settings were “hijacked”, redirecting around 80% of Twitter traffic to other websites. Although the “the motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site” and Twitter don’t believe users’ accounts were compromised, it’s probably a good reminder to get in and update your password - particularly if you use the same one for a number of different (and important) accounts.

In other social media news, the approval ratings are in on our favourite networking websites and LinkedIn have taken the top gong. In a study published by Mashable, LinkedIn scored a whopping 93% approval rating, significantly walloping Facebook (76%), Twitter (76%) and MySpace (69%). The web design of LinkedIn, along with the year’s economic woes, was cited as one of the primary reasons for it’s success. “The site’s architecture and design had something to do with it, as the three words most heavily associated with LinkedIn were efficiently, friendly and easy”. It goes to show that simple, elegant web design, and well-structured navigational systems are hard to beat.