TWITTER GETS HIT

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While many of us were recovering from the holiday and making lists of how we were going to be awesome in 2009, Twitter was putting on its boxing gloves trying to fight off hackers and phishing scams.

As you may have seen and/or experienced over the weekend, phishing tweets came in the form of direct messages and included a link that took you to a site that looked identical to the Twitter log-in page. Except it wasn’t. If you logged into this twitter log-in page, you gave your username and password away, thus opening your account to scammers who want to promote their sites to your twitter friends.

And then, to add to the Greatest Moments in Celebrity Hacking History, we learned of some peculiar anatomical information about celebrities like Britney Spears through bogus tweets. The pop princess wasn’t the only one hacked; president-elect Barack Obama, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, Fox News and 29 others were hacked Monday, leading to false and inappropriate messages being posted on their accounts.

While the prominent twitter’ers accounts were temporarily taken down so they could be investigated, it left many people re-tweeting the news and their concerns about their favorite celebs. As such, Twitter asked users to reset their passwords and to make sure the email in their settings was their own.

Today, things are back to normal in the Twitterverse and only a few people are still discussing the attacks.  Issues like this happen from time to time, and we were happy that Twitter was quick to respond and open with all of its users. We hope attacks like this can be prevented in the future, but in the meantime it’s probably a good time to make sure you changed your password. And, you should probably stop using the same one for all of your accounts. Just sayin.