• Celebrity Twitter Accounts Hacked (Bill O'Reilly, Britney Spears, Obama, More)

    Michael Arrington

    J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

    Monday, January 5th, 2009

    My guess is this has nothing to do with the phishing attacks that started on Twitter a couple of days ago. But a few minutes ago the official Fox News Twitter account posted “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay” (referring to the host of the popular Fox show O’Reilly Factor), right after a legitimate message about making turkey lettuce wraps.

    My guess is they’re just finding out about it now, and realizing their password, which was probably “password,” has been changed. Twitter will promptly restore the account to its rightful owners, I’m sure. But here’s my question – if you’ve had your Twitter account hacked, how long did it take you to get it back?

    Update: Ok, this is turning into a coordinated attack or one heck of a coincidence. The official Britney Spears Twitter account (which launched in October) also appears to have been hacked Any others?

    Update 2: We’ve got another winner: Rick Sanchez from CNN, who’s apparently not going to make it to work today because he’s “high on crack right now.”

    Update 3: Et Tu, Facebook? (see comments for bonus hack on Obama’s account)

    Update 4: Next! Huffington Post goes down too:


    Update 5: 33 accounts were hacked after Twitter’s internal admin tools were compromised.

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