As expected, Twitter reacted quickly to these attacks and pulled the support tool down and stated they will come back online only once they are safe and secure.

Techcrunch reported that these hacks track back to someone called ‘Gmz’ on a site named DigitalGangster. Gmz claims that the source had posted the twitter account information after obtaining it. Of course this information was quickly taken off the Digital Gangster forums, perhaps not before others had their hands on it.

Also, Twitter announced that the open authentication protocol, OAuth will be released in Beta this month. Though the new release will offer added security on third-party Twitter applications, It wouldn’t have stopped the phishing attack or the account hacks that happened over the weekend.

Twitter is doing whatever is necessary to secure your account information, however, as users you should take extra caution when you know twitter accounts are under attack.

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This morning Twitter informed it’s members of a phishing scam and requested them to be cautious, timing of this post couldn’t have been any better.

Anyway.. here is the list of people who have been hacked so far..

• Britney Spears: http://twitter.com/britneyspears/
• FoxNews: http://twitter.com/foxnews
• Barack Obama: http://twitter.com/barackobama
• Rick Sanchez (CNN Anchor) : http://twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn

Pretty nasty stuff was put on Britney’s twitter and Bill O’Reilly was pronounced Gay on FoxNews twitter. On the other hand Obama’s twitter only had a link requesting the followers to take a survey which most probably was an affiliate or spyware infected page.

So next time you see a Twitter-like login screen, make sure it is Twitter.com and not something else.

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