Fresh from a phishing scam, Twitter continues its bad 2009 with the accounts of prominent members have been hacked.
The Twitter accounts hacked include official accounts for Fox News, Barack Obama, Britney Spears, CNN’s Rick Sanchez and others for a total of 33 accounts.
One tweet to the official Fox News account (pic above) stated simply that Bill O’Reilly is gay.
The initial rumors suggested that the accounts had been compromised by the phishing scam, but that wasn’t the case, instead it was a security issue on Twitter’s end. From the Twitter blog :
The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend. 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 email address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck. 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.
After blessed intervention last year saved Twitter from itself, this can’t be a good sign for the year ahead. Still, this is Twitter, so expecting anything other than the unexpected is mistaken.
