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According to ComputerWorld, the accounts of more than 30 celebrities and organizations belonging to the social networking site Twitter were hacked early yesterday, including the accounts of President-elect Obama, Britney Spears, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and Fox News talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. Twitter so far hasn't identified the other targets.

The hacked accounts were used to send out a combo of salacious, phishing and plain old spam messages.

The ComputerWorld article reports that Twitter explained how the hacking occured this way, "These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the e-mail address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."

If you go to the Obama Twitter site, you can see that it is no longer working.

Twitter's website says that, "We are working to restore compromised accounts. As a precaution, it would be prudent to reset your Twitter password and make sure email in your settings is your own. More details to come."

Twitter has become a favorite target of hackers to send out phishing messages over the past few days, said ComputerWorld.