Twitter: Britney, Barack, Rick and Fox News weren’t phished – they were hacked

The guys at Twitter have posted more information on their website about the high profile accounts (belonging to the likes of Britney Spears, Barack Obama, Fox News, CNN’s Rick Sanchez and others) that were compromised on their website today.

Fascinatingly, Twitter claims that these accounts were not broken into as a result of the widespread phishing attack that has taken place on Twitter over the last couple of days, but instead were the result of Twitter’s own systems being compromised by hackers.

As a result, tools that normally only Twitter’s technical support team can use to help locked-out members reset their email address were accessed by hackers, enabling them to steal…

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.