Two simultaneous Twitter attacks happened over the weekend.  According to the official Twitter blog, these two attacks were not related, but rather one big coincidence that occurred at the same time. 

The first attack involved an individual that hacked into Twitter’s administration tools, specifically those that are used by the support team to reset emails in the event of forgotten logins.  Twitter immediately took the tools offline, but not before 33 accounts were compromised. 

Accounts belonging to celebrity twitter-ers such as Rick Sanchez of CNN, Barack Obama and Britney Spears were among those affected.  Tech Crunch has obtained screen shots of compromised accounts used to post scandalous material that range from comedic remarks to spam. Twitter said that all affected individuals should now have full control over their accounts once again.

The second attack was a more traditional phishing scam not unlike those found via emails.  On Twitter, you may “direct message” a friend as long as you are mutually following each other.  However, many prolific twitter-ers, such as Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.com, have taken on the philosophy of "following those that follow you" which essentially allows for anyone in your "Twitter-Sphere" to direct message you. 

The effectiveness behind this particular phishing scam and why it was so massive was in Twitter’s own design.  Similar to Facebook, a user can choose to be notified by email if they were messaged directly.  In that email, the message usually contains a fake Twitter login URL to view said message.  In this case, the URL redirected you to a spoofing page where if you were to enter in your credentials, the hackers would have your account information and password.

Twitter has said it will proactively reset the accounts affected by the phishing scam.  Its support team is also there to help if you find yourself a victim.  Users all over Twitter are generally annoyed that such scams happened, however this doesn’t seem to have much of a lasting impact on the micro-blogging community.

What do you think?  Will this hurt Twitter in the long run? Is tighter security necessary for the micro-blogging platform?  Let us know in the comments below!