Probably inspired by Michael Jackson's recent and unfortunate death, tasteless hackers thought it would be fun to falsely announce the demise of other celebrities as well. Such was the case with Britney Spears, P Diddy, or Ellen DeGeneres, whose Twitter feeds were hijacked to display fake digital obituaries.

Britney's over two million followers on Twitter had an unpleasant surprise when a fake tweet announcing her sudden death made its way on the pop diva's feed. "Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come," the short rogue message, auto-posted via TwitPic, read.

The announcement caused some uneasiness, especially since Twitter has been known to break last-minute news before large media agencies. Fortunately, it ended rather quickly, with the fake tweet being deleted and a new message informing fans that, "Britney's Twitter was just hacked. The last message is obviously not true. She is fine and dandy spending a quiet day at home relaxing."

The incident left security-aware people wondering about how the hack occurred. Sophos' Graham Cluley points out that TwitPic's later announcement about fixing a vulnerability with its email posting feature might be an indication.

"There certainly has been a concern in the past that TwitPic relies upon a four digit PIN that could be cracked through brute force. That would mean that I could post a message (and TwitPic link) on Britney's Twitter page if I could crack her four digit PIN and use it to email britneyspears.XXXX@twitpic.com (where XXXX are the four digits). That certainly doesn't seem like very good security," the security researcher concludes.

Meanwhile, Mashable reports that the attackers also targeted P Diddy and Ellen DeGeneres, whose feeds displayed similar fake death announcements. The same theme was also used as a subject for other hoaxes in the past. Back in 2007, a hacker broke into the YouTube account of teen star Miley Cyrus and falsely announced her death in a car accident.

Incidents of celebrity impersonation on Twitter have dramatically increased this year. In fact, Britney Spears' account was also hacked back in January, along with 32 other high-profile ones, and was used to post defamatory messages. Twitter feed hijacking via TwitPic has also been recently reported by Lindsay Lohan, after a controversial picture of Justin Timberlake was posted from her account.