Britney Spears isn’t dead – but her TwitPic *is* hacked

She may very well be the name associated with more spam, virus and hack attacks than anyone else in history. Yes, step aside Paris, Angelina and Bill, my guess is that the name that hackers choose to exploit for their own ends more than any other is Britney Spears.

In a tasteless stunt that was seen by her two million followers earlier today, a hacker managed to post the following message to Britney Spears’s Twitter stream earlier today:

Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come.

Interestingly, the fake story of Britney’s death was posted to her Twitter followers via the TwitPic service, which automatically forwards messages to the associated Twitter account. There are a number of ways in which you can post a message on TwitPic – which is then echoed on Twitter – including logging on to the service or sending a picture to a unique email address.

It’s possible that that last method of updating TwitPic may be the…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.