Recently, the harmonious functioning of Twitter was disrupted, when the micro-blogging website, that lets the users to broadcast short messages to groups of followers laned as a target of a wave of hacking and phishing attacks.

On Monday, it was confirmed by the San Francisco Company that a total number of accounts hijacked were 33, including those of President-elect Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears, and CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez.

Furthermore, on the very same day, several accounts were filled with fake updates, including obscene references to body parts and mentions of illicit drug use by some celebrities. Soon after the fake information was posted, it was deleted either by the account owners or Twitter moderators, who intervened quickly.

As per the company officials, the accounts were compromised by a malicious hacker who infiltrated the set of tools used by Twitter's support team to recover passwords and edit e-mail addresses associated with user accounts.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter said, "We detected it right away, shut down the accounts, and took away the tool."

"The accounts have since been restored but the tools are still being examined and will remain unavailable until the company resolves the situation," said Mr. Stone. He further added that he could not understand that why the popular social networking site was targeted but expressed, "Twitter has gotten a lot of attention recently, which could be reason enough for an attack."