06 January 2009

Digital prankster hacks celebrity Twitter accounts

Popular Micro-blogging site Twitter has had to temporarily suspend the accounts of several celebrities including Barack Obama, Britney Spears and CNN anchorman Rich Sanchez. The accounts were suspended due to a prank by an unknown hacker who hijacked the accounts with comical tweets.

CNN anchorman Rich Sanchez was among the targeted after sending out a feed which read "I am high on crack right now, might not be coming into work today." Fox News was also attacked after breaking the misspelled news; "Bill O'Riley is gay." Also making the hilarious headlines was Britney Spears who sent out a tweet saying "Hi Yall! Brit Brit here, just wanted to update you on the size of my..." - well, you get the picture.

Although Twitter admits that 33 accounts were hacked, we are still waiting in suspense to see who the other 29 'victims' were.

So how did it happen? According to a Twitter blog post, the entertaining tweets were orchestrated by someone who "hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck."

All of this is apparently unrelated to a separate security issue which is concerning Twitter users at the moment. Over the weekend, 'civilian' accounts were targeted messages offering free iPhones with the messages redirecting Twitter users to a fake login site. Twitter has since advised many users to change their passwords.

So who's the Twitter Trickster? Techcrunch who have put a lot of research into the story believe the trail leads back to the website digitalgangster.com, where a hacker known as 'gmz' is known to lurk. While tweets about Spear's anatomy are difficult to track, messages from the Facebook and Obama Twitter accounts redirected users to an affiliate site. In theory, Twitter only need to find out who owns the bank accounts in order to find the identity of the internet farceur.

In reality, very little real damage was done to those attacked. Rich Sanchez presumably made it into work and if Britney really wants to update us about her lower regions, she will do so when she next gets out of a taxi. The story is a nice diversion from the more worrying phishing attacks Twitter is failing to defend itself against.

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