Sunday night 1/4/2009 home alone and bored; a hacker (a.k.a., GMZ) accessed a twitter admin account by successfully running an automated password guessing script known as a dictionary attack (i.e., it tries every word in the dictionary).

Twitter allowed unlimited fast paced log-in attempts and to compound the problem, the target, “Crystal” a twitter staffer had foolishly picked the very weak password “happiness.”

Needless to say Crystal’s account quickly fell victim to GMZ’s intrusion attempts.

GMZ could now access other twitter accounts and reset their passwords.

GMZ claims he did not hack any twitter accounts personally, rather he posted to a hacker forum called www.DigitalGangster.com and offered access to any twitter account requested.

The requests poured in and multiple hackers took over the accounts of:
President-Elect Barack Obama
Britney Spears
Facebook
CBS News
Fox News

The hackers proceeded to send out spam from the user accounts they had taken over.  The spam messages included titles like “Bill O’Reilly is Gay.”

I clearly believe this to be a security breach. As personal information was exposed to the hackers who could use it for nefarious purposes as well as a stepping stone to gain more data through social engineering.

The following is the video GMX allegedly filmed and posted on YouTube (sans captions, music, voice, and hopefully a bit humor).