Fake Obama offered free petrol to Twitter users
Published 06 January, 2009, 17:30
The accounts of US president-elect Barack Obama and a number of celebrities, including pop singer Britney Spears and CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, with the social networking site Twitter have been hacked.
On Monday an alert was sent from Obama’s account notifying Twitter users of a new post – the first since November 5.
The fake Obama offered the opportunity to take part in an internet poll and win $US 500 worth of petrol while ‘Rick Sanchez’ informed the readers he was drugged with cocaine and would not go on air on Monday.
Twitter’s founder, Biz Stone, has notified users that a total of 33 accounts have come under attack, saying all of them were locked when the hacker alert came.
All the users are back in control of their accounts. The network support team is now busy resetting a number of passwords for other users.
At the weekend Twitter also suffered from a phishing scam aimed at getting users’ passwords and other sensitive information. Twitter, however, does not link the two issues.
Started in March of 2006 as a privately funded side project, Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.
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