From CNN:
The Twitter accounts of President-elect Barack Obama, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, Fox News and 29 others were hacked Monday according to the microblog site, leading to false and inappropriate messages being posted on their accounts.
Among those inappropriate messages were, apparently, a message about Bill O’reilly’s sexuality, a post from Rick Sanchez of CNN about how he was on crack and not going to work, something vulgar about Britney Spears, random letters on HuffPo, and a bunch of spam links on Obama’s page. The hack also affected 29 other people but everything is supposed to be back up and running:
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the site’s blog that the accounts were compromised after a hacker accessed tools the support team uses when a Twitter user can’t remember or wants to reset their login info.
“We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline,” Stone said in the blog post. “We’ll put them back only when they’re safe and secure.”
Jennifer Dargan, Director of Public Relations for CNN confirmed Sanchez’s account was compromised.
Sounds like a pretty embarrassing hack for Twitter. I mean someone being able to hack into your support tools and get into some of the highest-profile…um… profiles just ain’t good. But, hey, something like this is pretty much bound to happen when you get as big as Twitter is.
Valley Wag has a list of screen shots from the most famous hacked accounts, though I don’t think their story of what happened is correct.
