I'm a porn star

For several hours this evening my 3,000+ Twitter followers thought I was a 23 year old porn star. No - I'm not giving out the link but apparently my account had been hacked. I wouldn't mind except I see my Twitter account as something of value and while many of my regular followers saw it as a joke it is far from funny.

Ben Metcalfe (@dotben) was the first recipient of a duff missive that was direct messaged back to me. My initial response: "You having a larf?" At which point I discovered my account had been hacked. The next couple of hours were spent trying to figure out where the entry point came from. Given I'm a 'shiny new toy junkie' there is no chance of my working that out. The only recourse was to change my Twitter password in the hope that kills the problem. We'll see.

In conversation with Ben, it turns out (unsurprisingly) that while Twitter makes it really easy to develop new services, basic security is lacking. Throw that ball at Twitter or the folks that develop the services? I have no idea.

What I can say is that there is a delicious irony in the fact that Evan Williams, one of Twitter's founders is at the White House today, on invitation, presumably to help the US government work out a way of innovating out of the current  recession.

I leave it to readers to figure out what all of that means. In the meantime, as an enterprisey guy - I am far from being a happy bunny.

Bonus link: Ben talks about this issue - please bookmark.

UPDATE: Security consultant Rik Ferguson of TrendMicro says:

So far over 700 Twitter accounts have been compromised in the two hours since 7pm GMT. (6th March)

Apparently the porn site looks as though it is designed to harvest credit card details.