How celebrity Twitter accounts were hacked, and how it can be stopped in future

Wired has published details of how a hacker managed to hack into Twitter’s internal systems earlier this week, opening the door for criminals to break into the Twitter accounts of the likes of Britney Spears, Fox News and Barack Obama.

The teenage hacker, who uses the online handle GMZ, claims he gained entry to the micro-blogging site’s administrative control panel by using a dictionary password guesser at a Twitter staffer’s account.

Unfortunately for Twitter and its hacked users, the staff member had chosen the dictionary word “happiness”.

Wired has published a YouTube video made by GMZ, demonstrating the hack in action. Unfortunately 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.