Britney Spears and US president elect Barack Obama were amongst the victims of a hackers attack on the popular micro-blogging site Twitter earlier this week.
The profile pages of 33 high-profile bloggers were vandalised by intruders who are thought to have used a simple password guessing hack to break into user accounts, with Spears, Obama and CNN broadcaster Rick Sanchez all targeted.
Whilst it is believed that no sensitive data has been stolen, the pranksters changed the status updates of the affected users to some bizarre and, in some cases pornographic messages.
The fictional updates included a message from Mr Sanchez saying he would not be in work because he was high on drugs, a link to free petrol from Mr Obama whilst Ms Spears’ comments featured some more obscene revelations.
All affected accounts have since been fixed by Twitter.
The security breach happened when hackers broke into tools used by the Twitter support team to help people edit the email address associated with their account.
“We’ll put the tools back only when they’re safe and secure,” the blog promised.
That attack, described by Twitter as “Monday morning madness” comes off the back of what it called a “wacky weekend” of attacks.
Prior to this latest incident, thousands of Twitter users fell victim to a phishing scam that invited them to click on a link to a fake Twitter login. The celebrity hack is thought to be unrelated to the recent phishing scandal.
