Cybersecurity

Cyberthreats

Cybercrime

Cyberattack

Cyberconflict

Home » Cyberattack, Headline

Weak Password Brings ‘Happiness’ to Twitter Hacker

Submitted by admin on Thursday, 8 January 2009No Comment
Weak Password Brings ‘Happiness’ to Twitter Hacker

fox_news_fake_twitter

An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday’s hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s, and the official feed for Fox News.

The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter’s administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user’s account. The user turned out to be a member of Twitter’s support staff, who’d chosen the weak password “happiness.” [Wired]

  • Print this article!
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • FriendFeed
  • HackerNews
  • MySpace
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter
Sphere: Related Content

Leave a comment!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.