Yesterday morning, the Twitter accounts of more than 30 celebrities and organizations have been hijacked by hackers. The accounts belong, among others, to President Elect Barack Obama, Fox News and Britney Spears.
Twitter’s operations team identified and addressed the problem immediately: "This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been 'hacked,' including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama," announced Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in post to the company blog, adding that "We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack and others are now back in control of their accounts."
Mr. Stone explained that the accounts were accessed by hacking some of the tools installed by the company’s support team to help users edit their e-mail addresses associated with their Twitter accounts, for the situations when they might forget their password or other situations. "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," he said.
The account of CNN’s correspondent Rick Sanchez, presented a message after the hack claiming that ‘I am high on crack right now might not be coming to work today;’ Fox News' Twitter reported "Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay," attacking the network's conservative talk show host. The account of President Elect Barack Obama featured a link to a Web site that promised visitors a $500 gas card gift for taking a survey. Also, Facebook’s Twitter invited users to getlaid.info (it has been shut down in the meantime), which redirected them to an xxx page.
Twitter explained, meanwhile, that the phishing scam – to send messages from Twitter friends to trick users into entering all of their registration details into a customized log-in screen – has been dealt with and at this point is fully under control. "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. It also said that the company’s support team will surely have a very busy week, as the plan is to reset a whole list of passwords, in order to make sure that all measures have been taken.
The quick response of Twitter’s support team was appreciated by users everywhere and especially by the ones involved in yesterday’s incident. As mentioned above, as soon as the attack was reported, the company’s administrators took the necessary measures to make sure that the intrusion is stopped and then proceeded to clean up the mess and secure everyone’s connection once again.
For now, there are no clues on the people or the person responsible for the hack, and the reason for the action is also unknown, except for the attempt to bring in revenue from the add pages promoted on the hacked Twitter accounts. This is a well known scheme, done by many all over the Web, either promoting a certain product, or a new service – the problem is that there is no certainty in the quality of the product and there is also the chance of being just a front for getting a user’s account details.
