New York, United States, January 6: Back to back security problems for Twitter. After Saturday’s phishing campaign on the micro-blogging service, hackers broke into close to three dozen high profile Twitter accounts. Accounts of President-Elect Barack Obama, Britney Spears and Fox News appeared in the list of accounts that were hacked.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged the lapse. His post on the company blog read, “This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been 'hacked', including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama."
The blog also mentioned that corrective action had been taken immediately. "We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack and others are now back in control of their accounts."
The righteous owners may be back in control of their accounts but not before these were used to send malevolent communication. Majority of the messages sent by the hackers were nasty. CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez's reported in his counterfeit post, “I am high on crack right now might not be coming to work today." Similarly, Fox News' Twitter claimed, “breaking: Bill O Riley is gay.”
A free social networking site, Twitter.com allows micro-blogging to its users. The users are also entitled to read other users' posts. Such posts are referred to as tweets and are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Explaining the modus operandi of the hackers, a Twitter blog revealed that the hacker gained right of entry to some of Twitter's support tools and apparently got control to change around the accounts' information. "These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the e-mail address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck," read the blog.
Stone made a clean breast of it and confessed that the hacking was a very grave security violation. He claimed that they immediately took the support tools offline and confirmed, "We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."
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