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A hacker going by the name of “Hacker Croll” has apparently gained access to an administrator account at the micro-blogging service Twitter.

Posting on a French online discussion forum, Hacker Croll claimed to have hacked into the account of Jason Goldman, one of Twitter’s directors of product management. To back up the claims, he or she posted 13 screenshots of Twitter’s account management interface.

The screenshots suggest that the hacker was able to access the accounts of several celebrity Twitter users, including those of the singer Britney Spears and the actor Ashton Kutcher.

Late on Thursday evening, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone made the following statement on the site’s official blog.

“This week, unauthorized access to Twitter was gained by an outside party. Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way. However, we discovered that 10 individual accounts were viewed during this unauthorized access.”

Obama’s, Britney Spears’ Twitter Accounts Hacked

Hackers have accessed the accounts of a series of celebrities on the popular micro-blogging Web site Twitter and left a variety of pornographic and dubious messages and links.

In the most serious breach of security for the burgeoning blogging site, beloved of the tech community, hackers have targeted more than 30 accounts including those belonging to Britney Spears, Barack Obama, Facebook, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and the Huffington Post.

[Fox News Channel's Twitter account was also hacked with a message regarding commentator Bill O'Reilly.]

Twitter users post short updates — of less than 140 characters — on their accounts which can be followed by other users. The site has rapidly gained popularity since its launch in April last year.

Increasingly celebrities have signed up as a way of connecting with their fans, and many news outlets use Twitter to alert people to new stories posted on their Web sites.

The hackers found a way to take over the online tools used by Twitter’s support team to post the false updates or tweets, Twitter said in a blog posting.

During the security breach, Britney Spears falsely posted about the size of her genitals, Barack Obama (who has not used Twitter since his election victory) posted a link to a poll with the prize of winning free gasoline, Rick Sanchez said he was not coming into the office because he was high on crack cocaine and Facebook listed a link to a pornography site.

All the false postings have now been taken down and the accounts returned to the rightful owners, Twitter said

NEW YORK (CNN) — Someone opened a can of worms on popular microblogging service Twitter this weekend, a company co-founder says, and a 17-year-old told an online tech news network that he was that someone.

Virus-infected tweets assaulted Twitter, the microblogging site, in four waves last weekend.

In a post on Twitter’s official blog, company co-founder Biz Stone said computer worms had spread virus-infected tweets that assaulted Twitter in four waves from Saturday morning through Sunday night.

The company deleted some 10,000 infected tweets from at least 190 compromised accounts that could have continued to propagate the virus, he said.

Michael Mooney, a 17-year-old high school senior whose hacker handle is Mikeyy, claimed to be the creator and disseminator of the worms.

In an interview with CNET News, Mooney said that he embarked on the weekend hacking spree because he “was bored.”

Some of the rogue tweets directed users to StalkDaily.com, a Twitter-like messaging service created by Mooney. The worm also caused infected accounts to repost tweets that Mooney appeared to have written.

A few Twitter users took to their Twitter pages to vent their frustration with the high jinks. “This little worm needs to have his little bubble burst,” wrote user JWMcGregor.

But other Twitterers were less concerned.

“There are risks associated with all methods of news gathering and communication,” said CNN’s own prolific Twitter scribe Rick Sanchez, who added that Twitter’s advantages “outweigh the types of minor annoyances we’ve seen recently.”

Stone said that Twitter is taking steps to make sure this weekend’s worm onslaught is Twitter’s last such security breach.

“We’ll be reviewing our Web coding practices to make sure something like this won’t happen again,” he said, emphasizing that “no passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information was compromised as part of these attacks.”

Stone declined to comment on whether Twitter will file charges against Mooney.