Twitter accounts hacked

Twitter accounts belonging to celebrities such as Britney Spears and Lily Allen were compromised earlier this week.

A French hacker posted details of how he managed to access the accounts of 10 members and was able to view information such as telephone numbers and email addresses.

Twitter said the affected members had been contacted and apologised for the breach.

"Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way. However, we discovered that 10 individual accounts were viewed during this unauthorised access," Twitter's Biz Stone said.

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"We have personally contacted Twitter users whose accounts were compromised via this unauthorised access. Twitter takes security very seriously so we will be conducting a thorough, independent security audit of all internal systems," Stone continued.

The hacker managed to access the accounts by stealing a member of staff's password and guessing the answer to their secret question.

This week, Facebook was criticised for making its security questions too obvious.

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Sophos' Graham Cluley said Twitter shouldn't take all of the blame for the hack.

"Although many will blame Twitter for not ensuring that its staff followed sensible policies to better secure critical administrator accounts, lets not forget that the real criminal here is [the hacker].

"They have acted illegally by breaking into these accounts, even if they didn't do anything malicious when accessing the celebrity accounts," Cluley said.

This isn't the first security problem Twitter has faced, with a series of worms hitting the micro-blogging site over the Easter weekend.