Britney Spears was one of the 33 high-profile Twitter users whose profiles were hacked yesterday, (Monday), this latest incident just after a phishing scam that had many Twitter users directed to a fake homepage where they unknowingly gave their log-in information.
The hacker posted nasty comments about the people and companies whose profiles were targeted. Some of the other celebrity victims were: President-elect Barack Obama, Fox News, Huffinton Post, and Rick Sanchez of CNN.
Rude postings about the size of Britney’s private parts were put up on her Twitter site, while comments about using “crack” appeared on Sanchez’s page. Negative remarks about the romantic tendencies of Bill O’Reilly showed up on Fox News’s page.
Twitter has deleted the fake posts and reset the passwords on the hacked accounts.
The social networking site says they don’t think that this latest security breach was in any way related to the phishing scam that occurred this past weekend.
In that incident, users were directed to a phony site with an address almost identical to that of the actual Twitter log-in page. The fake page seemed identical to the legitimate page, as it also had working text input areas and radio buttons.
When users attempted to log-in, they got an 404 error page instead, with their log-in information covertly recorded.
Twitter posted a small notice on the page of each user warning them about the attacks.
Firefox warns users before allowing access to that type of phony site, but Internet Explorer does not give any warning.
“Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or “tweets,” from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.”
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter wrote on the site’s blog that the accounts were compromised after a hacker accessed tools the support team uses when a Twitter user wants to reset their log-in information, or forgets their info.
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