Wednesday, January 7, 2009

twitter Hacked! : Monday Morning Madness


twitter accounts of Britney Spears, Prez elect Barack Obama & other celebrities hacked!
Hackers have accessed the accounts of a series of celebrities on the popular micro-blogging site twitter and left a variety of pornographic and dubious messages and links.
For example, the hacker, purporting to be US newscaster Rick Sanchez, wrote: "I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today."
In the most serious breach of security for the burgeoning blogging site, beloved of the tech community, hackers have targeted more than 30 accounts including those belonging to Britney Spears, Barack Obama, Facebook, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and the Huffington Post. Twitter on Monday (Jan 5th 2009) said the hacker had broken into 33 accounts by gaining access to tools used by its support team.
"These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post. "We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."
In the phishing attempt, scammers sent out email notifications purporting to be from Twitter that contained a link to a site "masquerading as the Twitter front page", wrote Stone in a blog post on Saturday. The object of the scam was to collect people's Twitter sign-in details, which would allow the phisher to send messages in the guise of the compromised user. In the event of a compromise, Stone said user passwords would automatically be reset and notification emails sent out.
According to the security company, thousands of Twitter members have reported receiving messages from friends inviting them to visit a website containing funny pictures, a blog and in some cases even the chance to win an Apple iPhone.
The hacking attack comes at a bad time for Twitter which is poised to break out of the tech community to become a mainstream social networking tool. Ev Williams, one of the site's founders, tweeted that the atmosphere at the office today was "focused anxiety".

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