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Hacker Claims Responsibility For Celeb Hacks
Jason Lee Miller
Staff Writer
2009-01-09
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
It would be hard to be more embarrassed than the guy caught with his pants down at the ski life-whose photos are at SmokingGun-but if there's a contender, it's "Crystal" at Twitter, whose admin support account was hacked by a standard "dictionary" attack.
 | | Hacker Claims Responsibility For Celeb Hacks |  |
A dictionary attack is one that generates passwords from ordinary English words. According to "GMZ," whom Wired credits with the hack, Crystal's password was "happiness." Oh, oh, the irony.
GMZ's hack led to the 33 compromised celebrity accounts sending out bizarre tweets from Britney Spears, Fox News, and CNN"s Rick Sanchez and others.
Though Crystal's account says, at least it does now, that she is with Twitter support, GMZ claims he picked her account at random because her name kept popping up on so many other accounts, and that he was unaware she was a Twitter staffer when he began. He realized it only after becoming aware of the ability to reset any Twitter user's password.
Here's an interesting decision making process to chew on: After realizing he'd unexpectedly hacked a Twitter staffer and that he'd forgotten to cloak his IP address and was therefore traceable, GMZ deferred to fellow hackers populating the Digital Gangster forum so they could hack the accounts instead.
In most places this is known as "aiding and abetting." Bygones. It was through this hack outsourcing that Fox announced Bill O'Reilly was gay and that Britney spoke of her 4-foot vagina dentata problem.
GMZ also claimed credit for hacking Miley Cyrus's YouTube account and posting information about her (fabricated) death.
On the company blog Twitter founder Biz Stone said they were taking this pretty seriously. The company also said they'd be securing their network better in the future.
About the Author:
Jason is a graduate of the University of Kentucky. He covers business, technology, and security issues.
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