Some 40,000 followers of Rich Sanchez's Twitter page may have been led to believe that the CNN anchor had a drug problem after a tweet appeared saying "i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today." No, Sanchez wasn't really high on crack, nor was he cracking a joke (see what we did there?), but he was the victim of a hacker who took control of his account while he was away doing rehab (for his knee, not for drugs).
Around the same time this occurred, a password stealing phishing scam has been gaining steam by disguising itself as a private message leading to a fake Twitter log-in screen and targeting various celebrities, such as Britney Spears, the account for Fox News, and president elect Barack Obama. The ordeal had Sanchez scratching his head, but Twitter has now revealed this incident had nothing to do with the recent phishing scam.
"The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend," Twitter wrote in a blog post. "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 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."
The falsly incriminating tweet has been removed, and we hear Sanchez made it work that day, sober and all.
Speaking of off the wall tweets and potentially self incriminating confessions, be sure to sign up for and follow Will Smith's Twitter page for a chance at winning some cool tchotchkes, and check out other members of team Maximum PC, including yours truly.