Twitter "Hacked" Again as "Hacker Croll" Gains Access to Twitter Accounts of Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher

"Hacker Croll" posted screen captures on the French forums at Zataz.com to prove that he gained administrator access by logging in as Jason Goldman, a director of product management for Twitter (@goldman on Twitter).

The screen captures suggest that this individual viewed the accounts of stars Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, Lily Allen, and President Barack Obama.

According to the images, Lily Allen and Ashton Kutcher both block celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

The April 29th post titled "Twitter Got Hacked... Again !" states, "The images were taken from the Admin area that was secured with .htaccess."

This has been officially confirmed on the Twitter Blog, stating, "Personal information that may have been viewed on these 10 individual accounts includes email address, mobile phone number (if one was associated with the account), and the list of accounts blocked by that user. We have personally contacted Twitter users whose accounts were compromised via this unauthorized access."

Twitter assures that they are taking steps to increase security.

At this point, it is unclear where "Hacker Croll" will go from here, but this appears to have been done simply for "bragging rights" and personal amusement.

On April 27th, Goldman posted a Twitter update stating that his "Yahoo!" email account had been "hacked."

"Hacker Croll" claims to have done this by answering the "secret question" on his web-based email account, thereby gaining access to his Twitter password.

An 18-year-old student calling himself "GMZ" used a "password-guessing" program to determine that a Twitter administrator's password was "happiness" back in January of this year.

From there, he also gained access to Britney Spears' Twitter.

Whereas "GMZ" posted as Spears, "Hacker Croll" refrained.

At this time, Twitter has yet to monetize its rapidly growing website. With bigwigs like Google and Facebook vying to buy the internet phenomenon, security will most certainly heighten when Twitter chooses its next step.

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Sources:

Twitter Blog:

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/04/unauthorized-access-update-on-security.html

Original Post by "Hacker Croll" at Zataz.Com:

http://www.zataz.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=10005

CRN.Com:

http://www.crn.com/security/217201190;jsessionid=DSL14SKZFHCQMQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN

Times Online:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6205367.ece