Hackers Take Over Celebrity Twitter Accounts
Hackers have targeted several of micro-blogging site Twitter’s most high profile bloggers, the site said.
Twitter said 33 accounts had been compromised, including those belonging to president-elect Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears.
The company said, however, the celebrity accounts are now secure.
Hackers exposed the accounts through a phishing scam on the site that encouraged users to click on a fake Twitter homepage.
The Twitter accounts, which allow users to post short updates of less than 140 characters, sported stranger and sometimes pornographic messages after they were taken over.
CNN broadcaster Rick Sanchez, who was one of the celebrity victims, awoke Monday morning to find his Twitter update said he would not be in work because he was “high on crack”.
President-elect Barack Obama’s Twitter showed a link to free petrol while Britney Spears’ account detailed some very personal statistics.
Twitter announced on its blog that the issue with those 33 accounts is different from the phishing scam aimed at most Twitter users.
"We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others, are now back in control of their accounts," the blog said.
Evidently, the security breach occurred after hackers broke into tools used by the Twitter support team to help people edit the email address associated with their account.
"We’ll put the tools back only when they’re safe and secure," the blog promised.
Twitter described the attack as "Monday morning madness" occurring right after what it called a "wacky weekend" of attacks.
Thousands of Twitter users were affected by the phishing scam that invited people to click on a link to a fake Twitter login. It then obtained account details that could be used to harvest more accounts.
Officials say there were no financial gains from the scam and seemingly no link to the celebrity hack.
However, the celebrity hack is the more worrying, according to Graham Cluley, senior consultant with security firm Sophos.
"It appears that Twitter’s systems were potentially exposing everybody’s accounts to the dangers of being taken over by hackers – it’s just that they chose some high profile accounts to abuse with their defacements," he said.
Cluley said Twitter seems convinced that it was an individual rather than a gang of criminals so it may be that they have identified the person responsible.
—
On the Net: