Social Networking, Hackers | featured news

A 25-year-old unemployed Frenchman has been arrested for hacking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and Britney Spears, the pop star.

Hackers briefly blocked access to the popular Internet messaging service Twitter, steering traffic to another Web site where a group reportedly calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" claimed responsibility.

Thanks to the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it's a given that malicious hackers will devise ways to exploit the sites' numerous users in order to infect their computers with malware. This unwanted software is designed to do a number of terrible things ranging from identity theft to turning computer into remote-controllable "zombie" machines.

Facebook Inc., the world's most popular social-networking Web site, was awarded $711 million in damages against a spammer who gained access to users' accounts and sent phony messages.

The popular social networking site Twitter has been hit by a denial of service attack, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. In an e-mail to CNN.com, Stone said this morning's attack is not related to a recent incident in which a hacker stole internal documents from the site. Twitter's site went down around 9:30 a.m. ET.

The microblogging service fears the social network could put it out of business.

Twitter seeks legal advice after hundreds of documents were hacked and a number of blogs publish some of the stolen material.

A French hacker posts 13 screenshots of a Twitter product manager's admin interface to prove the claim.