Hackers Defile Mormon Church Twitter Presence

The official Twitter account of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), informally referred to as the Mormon Church, has been hacked by unknown individuals. The perpetrators sent profane messages calling Joseph Smith a liar.

The LDS Church registered an account on Twitter about two months ago in order to send news to its followers. The @LDSChurchNews account was hijacked sometime last weekend, but it took Twitter until Thursday to suspend it.

The hackers were reportedly able to gain access to the account by stealing the password. "I don't know how they got the password. I'm very skeptical (of Twitter) now," commented Charlie Crane, director of interactive media for the Deseret News, a company owned by LDS Chruch.

The first to react were the account's followers, who immediately realized that something was off when reading the message posted by the hackers. "Can you tell me if Facsimile 3 is Osiris or Abraham? I mean it seems like Smith just made the whole thing up out of nowhere. He lied!!" it read.

"My guess is that whoever was running the @LDSChurchNews Twitter account either chose an easy-to-guess password, or were careless […] with password security," noted Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus vendor Sophos. "If you choose a password that's a dictionary word, or simple to guess if someone knows about your interests or family life, then you're making things far too simple for hackers to break into your accounts," he explained.

Meanwhile, Crane expresses his dissatisfaction that Twitter does not send e-mail confirmation messages when the password gets changed, a mechanism enforced by other social networking platforms. However, such a feature would be of little use if the point of entry was actually the e-mail itself, as it was the case with a Twitter admin that recently got both his e-mail and Twitter accounts hacked.

There are also precedents of brute force hacking on Twitter. At the beginning of the year, a teenage hacker hijacked 33 high-profile Twitter accounts, including the ones belonging to Britney Spears, Barack Obama, Rick Sanchez, or Fox News, after launching a brute force dictionary attack against the account of Twitter staffer named Crystal. The teenager later revealed that her password was "happiness."