Get ready for Twishing in 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
At least three celebrity and political twitter accounts were hacked into this afternoon on a day that began with reports of spam messages infiltrating the social networking site dedicated to status updates.
The accounts in questioned belonged to Britney Spears, Barack Obama and CNN's Rick Sanchez, who often uses the website to gage viewer response about various issues throughout the day, ReadWriteWeb.com reports.
According to the website, Obama's account sent out messages about a free gas card, Spears' posted a message about her anatomy, and Sanchez's apparently posted that he was "high on crack and might not be coming into work today."
Twitter has said the security breach has been dealt with and has urged users to change their passwords, according to the website.
Earlier today, there were reports about spam status updates with a malicious link being spread throughout the twitter universe in an effort to steal user's passwords, according to a blog post on Twitter's site.
The phishing attack brought up a fake Twitter page and, presumably, sent the login information to a cybercriminal.
Security officials had predicted cybercriminals may target more social networking sites in 2009, which suggests the hacking at Twitter may only be the beginning.
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