DM Blog

The Globe & Mail reports:

Twitter hackers target Obama, Spears

Twitter has swelled so large, so quickly, that it was only a matter of time before the growing pains kicked in.

Over the weekend, the popular micro-blogging site and rising Web 2.0 star attracted some unwanted attention from hackers and scammers, who successfully infiltrated 33 of the service’s most high-profile accounts, including those used by president-elect Barack Obama, CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez and Britney Spears.

Twitter responded by locking down the affected accounts until the problem could be solved, but not before the mysterious hackers used their access to post an assortment of profane and insulting comments that were attributed to the real owners of the compromised profiles.

[…]

Hackers used the account belonging to Fox News to post the message “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay,” while Mr. Obama’s account linked to a phoney website offering a $500 gas card in return for completing a survey.

Mr. Sanchez’s profile featured the message “I am high on crack right now and might not be coming into work today.”

[…]

Twitter is particularly popular in Toronto, which is ranks eighth on a list of the Top 30 locations on Twitter based on the supplied biographical information of users, according to the Hubspot survey. Between 5,000 and 10,000 new Twitter accounts are created every day, the report said.

[…]

At least some of the messages were kind of funny! ;-) And go Toronto! Calgary is probably on the list of "Bottom 10 locations" – haha.

(The Globe & Mail is on Twitter too.)