Britney Spears has got her Twitter and MySpace accounts hijacked by vandals looking to defame her. The rogue status updates posted yesterday on her feed made references to Devil worshiping and the New World Order.

Britney Spears, Twitter and hackers seem to be a recurring theme. Back in January, she was amongst the victims of a hacker who commandeered 33 high-profile accounts belonging to the likes of Barack Obama, Rick Sanchez or Fox News.

A second attack happened in June when pranksters falsely announced the singer's death via her Twitter feed as part of a larger attack also affecting the accounts of P Diddy and Ellen DeGeneres. In both previous incidents, the hijacking occurred indirectly, by exploiting a flaw in a third-party platform or by compromising administrative credentials; however, this latest attack seems to be more personal.

"It's not clear at this stage how Britney's Twitter account was compromised - but probably the most likely bet is that a simple easy-to-crack password was being used or that one of Britney's team fell for a phishing attack," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, notes. The password cracking theory is enforced by the fact that the singer's MySpace account was also compromised at the same time.

The hacker's intention in this case was only to vandalize Britney's account and post defamatory messages. The alleged Masonic symbol of the Illuminati was set as the background of the page and one of the rogue status updates read, "I give myself to Lucifer every day for it to arrive as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!"

The incident was acknowledged by the singer's staff. "This morning, Britney's Twitter and MySpace were hacked. We apologize for any offense the message from the hacker caused and are working with Twitter on remedying the situation as quickly as possible," a message on her official website reads. Both accounts have since been restored to normal.

"No big deal. No harm was done," some would argue, but incidents such as these could pose a serious threat if the attacker has malicious intentions. "Imagine, for example, if the hacker had posted a message saying 'Free tickets to a secret concert' which had taken some of Britney Spears's millions of ardent fans to a malicious website," Mr. Cluley writes. Just to get an idea of the scope such an attack could have, we should point out that Britney Spears has 3,763,154 followers on Twitter.