14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been in turmoil yesterday when vulgar and discrediting messages started being posted from the accounts of several celebrities or popular organizations. The website's administration has confirmed that around 33 such accounts have been compromised after a hacker obtained unauthorized access to some support tools.
Britney Spears' Twitter followers were astonished when they received an update from the pop diva describing some of her intimate anatomical parts in very unfriendly terms. Not long after the media picked up the intriguing story, with screenshots and all, more reports started flowing in about other celebrities apparently pouring their hearts out on Twitter.
Such was the case of CNN's Rick Sanchez, who's Twitter stream was informing his followers that he was “high on crack” and might not be showing up to work, while Fox News's account was releasing breaking news referring to Bill O'Reilly's sexual orientation.
Early speculation connected these incidents to the recent account phishing campaigns that affected Twitter. However, Biz Stone, co-founder of the popular micro-blogging service, cleared things up by writing on the website's official blog that “The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend.”
Mr. Stone explained that an unauthorized individual obtained access to some special account management tools used by the website's staff when assisting users locked out from their accounts. These tools allow changing the associated e-mail addresses, and it was fortunate that the hacker only decided to mess around with these 33 high profile accounts, when he clearly had the ability to launch more serious attacks.
“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,” Stone wrote. The Twitter founder also noted that the hacked accounts had been returned to their respective owners. “Our support team is definitely going to have a busy week, because we reset a bunch of passwords just to be on the safe side,” he added, also referring to the recent phishing incident.
Another noteworthy profile that was compromised was that of Barack Obama, who hasn't used his account since he was elected president of the United States. Facebook's account on Twitter was also amongst the affected ones, and was promoting what seemed to be an adult content website. “One thing is for certain: Twitter has had an appalling start to 2009 from the security point of view,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for antivirus vendor Sophos, concluded.
