After reports of yesterday's Twitter attacks, a post points the way to members of the online forum DigitalGangster as the source of sinister activity.

As reported by Amos yesterday, someone hacked into Twitter and gained access to the administration tools, thereby accessing 33 accounts of celebrities such as CNN's Rick Sanchez, President-elect Berak Obama and the pop-star-come-clean Britney Spears. The attack was one of two different offensive assaults towards the micro-blogging community, the second consisting of a more standard phishing scam rather than a hostile takeover. The DigitalGangster forum appeared in the spotlight before, posting photos of Miley Cyrus after hackers gained access to her YouTube account.

However, according to this forum post, DigitalGangster forum member GMZ broke into Twitter's administration tools and then displayed proof on another forum post (which forum moderators deleted). He thus called on forum members to email him for the information. Apparently, four other members took the bait and joined in on the Twitter hacking spree. After the original DigitalGangster post came down, the information spread to other forums. This scenario actually gives a better picture of the overall hacking attempt, and why the messages had so many different agendas.

The images displayed on the current forum post shows the hacker sending messages through accounts used by Fox News, Britney Spears, Rick Sanchez. Tech Crunch points out that some of the messages include affiliate links (for the purpose of generating revenue), and will make it easy to track down the culprits, as affiliate programs always lead a paper trail back to the payee.

Strangely enough, the supposed 18-year-old hacker, a student residing on the east coast, contacted Wired's Threat Level and agreed to an interview. He claimed that Twitter's password was weak, and that he used a password tool he authored. The program launched a dictionary attack against a Twitter account belonging to a woman identified as "Crystal" Sunday night. Thinking she was just a popular member, he later discovered that Crystal was actually a Twitter staffer, and once he gained access to her account Monday morning, he could access any other account thereafter.

What GMZ failed to do was hide his IP address as he hacked into Twitter. Realizing his mistake, the hacker decided not to hijack other accounts, but rather offer the information to fellow DigitalGangster forum members. Why didn't he use some type of proxy to hide is address? According to Threat Level, he really didn't think the intrusion was important enough to draw law-enforcement attention. He certainly didn't think his hacking attempt would make "headline news."

Suddenly GMZ found himself filling requests, other members wanting information on how to hack into popular Twitter accounts. In all, 33 accounts were compromised including Fox News, CBS News, Digg Founder Kevin Rose and many more. GMZ believes that he remained in his Twitter account for a few hours before the company figured out what was going on and closed his account.

It's speculated that the entire claim is bogus, that it's just a wanna-be hacker talking trash on a forum. But Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed how the attack on the administrative account was made (using the dictionary attack), thereby verifying GMZ's claim. "We're waiting to hear back from our lawyer about what our responsibilities are about this and how to approach it," Stone told Threat Level in a separate phone interview.

Currently GMZ is studying game development (chalk one up for the politicians), and previously used his dictionary attack script to hack into Miley Sirus' YouTube account last November. After YouTube blocked his IP, GMZ turned to Twitter to continue the fun. GMZ claims that he had never heard of Twitter until he hacked into YouTube.

Go figure