January 5, 2009 | 6:58 pm

Twitter hack includes Obama, Spears

Posted by Adam Wills

Twitter accounts for President-elect Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears, CNN’s Rich Sanchez, Fox News, The Huffington Post and Facebook were among 33 victims of a hacker, who used the company’s own support tools to gain access to their accounts.

Twitter users this morning found Obama, whose account has been inactive since the election, pushing an online “opinion survey” for a gas card; Sanchez’s account read that he was “high on crack right now might not be coming into work today”; Fox News, meanwhile, reported “Breaking: Bill O Riley [sic] is gay”; and Britney’s tweet said things that would make for an interesting – if graphic – celebrity hentai.

A release on the Twitter blog this afternoon said “these accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck.”

The compromised accounts were locked down, and have since been returned to their authorized users.

The attack is different from last weekend’s phishing scam asking users to “check out a funny blog about you,” which compromised several thousand Twitter accounts. Actor Stephen Fry was reportedly among those caught up in that scam.

“In addition to this Monday morning madness we’re coming off a wacky weekend where lots of folks were tricked into participating in a Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users,” Twitter reported. “Our support team is definitely going to have a busy week because we reset a bunch of passwords just to be on the safe side.”

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