There might be some answers in the near future on the people responsible for the Twitter hack, which left 33 accounts exposed, including the one of President Elect Barack Obama, Britney Spears, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and commentator Bill O’Reilly.
According to recent reports, some members of the online forum Digital Gangster might be responsible for the attack, as a hacker calling himself GMZ announced on the forum that he managed to gain access to Twitter login information and then called on other DG members to get in touch with him for credentials to individual accounts. Besides GMZ, there are at least four other members who claim to have taken part in Monday’s events.
As soon as the incident was exposed, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone posted on the company blog that "This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been 'hacked,' including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama," and also added that "We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack and others are now back in control of their accounts."
The attacks were made by hacking into the tools installed for editing the e-mail addresses associated with users’ Twitter accounts, a feature developed for certain situations such as a forgotten password.
Mr. Stone explained that this was considered to be a very serious security breach and the support tools were taken offline immediately, with the intention of putting them back only after everything will be safe and secure.
Each one of the accessed accounts was messed with – for example, the page of CNN’s correspondent Rick Sanchez showed a message that said ‘I am high on crack right now might not be coming to work today;’ Fox News' Twitter reported that "Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay," in reference to the network's conservative talk show host. A different strategy was used on the account of President Elect Barack Obama, which featured a link to a Web site promising visitors a $500 gas card gift for agreeing to take a survey and on Facebook’s Twitter was included a link to getlaid.info (it has been shut down in the meantime), which redirected visitors to a porn Web site.
"Our on-call team was able to attend to the matter quickly and prevent too many people from being affected," noted Twitter's blog post, as the company wanted to assure everyone that the intrusion is no longer an issue. It also said that the company’s support team is expecting a very busy week, as it plans to reset a whole list of passwords, in order to make sure that all measures have been taken.
The investigation will continue, starting with the ones who claim to be involved. For now, it is not a certainty that they are indeed involved in the matter, as it is a common known fact that hackers go online and claim to have done things that they are in no connection with what so ever.
