A blog entry on Twitter yesterday confirmed that an outside party gained unauthorized access to Twitter. Although the blog entry notes that no account information was altered or removed, there were at least ten individual accounts that were viewed.

A more detailed report on Information Week provides a little more meat to the issue. Apparently, it began when a Twitter product manager’s Yahoo! mail account was hacked, using the same password recovery hack that was used to compromise Sarah Palin’s email account. Shortly after, someone known as “Hacker Croll” posted screenshots of Twitter’s administrative console on the Web, including admin information about Barack Obama’s  and Britney Spears’ accounts. The attacker explains on his post that access to Twitter was gained through the Twitter administrator’s Yahoo! account by resetting the secret question. The mailbox contained a message with the Twitter password, which gave the hacker access to Twitter. 

This is just one more example of why you should never use public email like Yahoo! for official or sensitive business of any sort.