Tuesday, Jan 6, 2009    Text size: 

The prominent micro-blogging website suffered a massive security failure this week that compromised the accounts of more than 30 high-profile users, including Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, CNN's Rick Sanchez, President-elect Barack Obama and pop star Britney Spears.

The hackers used a phishing scam to procure login information for the Twitter profiles. As soon as the unknown hacker got control, the profiles started to list bizarre or embarrassing false information about the users in question, including O'Reilly's sexual preference, Sanchez's addiction to crack and the size and make of Spears' privates.

President-elect Obama had not been updating his profile since the election. His compromised Twitter feed only listed a link to a spam survey elsewhere on the Internet. Twitter apologized to its users in a mass email.

"We considered this a very serious breach of security," wrote a Twitter representative.

Online pundits enjoyed a laugh at the expense of the popular website, where users post hundreds of short announcements about their current activities.

"Most of us got a good chuckle out of the various messages that were left on the Twitter accounts for Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Bill O’Reilly and others this morning, but one other message came through loud and clear — Twitter is not yet ready for primetime, even though users continue to flock to the service," wrote leading tech analyst Michael Arrington for TechCrunch.com.

Twitter's relevance to adult industry members has risen or fallen depending on how tech-savvy those industry professionals are and how much trouble they've had promoting themselves elsewhere. Adult performer Nikki Benz maintains a Twitter profile, but despite the legions of fans she commands on other social-networking sites, she only has a few followers on Twitter so far.

A few other adult entities also keep Twitter profiles, including the Adult Video News Awards. Twitter's terms of service do not specifically prohibit adult, instead warning users that they alone are responsible for what they post.