Those who visited Fox News’ Twitter page on Jan 5 might have seen this message: “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay”. or “I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today” - on CNN anchor Rick Sanchez’s twitter page.

Dismiss them: They were the work of miscreants and have been taken down. Hackers also defaced the Twitter pages of 31 other celebritiies, including President-elect Barack Obama and pop princess Britney Spears, leaving pornographic messages on some and links to dodgy company websites on others. Twitter, a micro-blogging website hat allows users to send status updates from their mobile phones, instant messaging services and Facebook, is popular with celebrities as a way of connecting with their audience.

And a huge and trusting user base is the reason it is only a matter of time before hackers wreak havoc on other social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace. It may seem dumb but people do let their guard down on social networking spaces. They leave messages for friends and respond to messages without so much as a second thought.

Netizens often forget that a bad guy can move into the Net Neighbourhood. A message from him/her inviting you to click on a phony link, which you unthinkingly do, can rob you of your username and password. Which is precisely what is happening: Phishing scams have started to show up on Twitter accounts too. Messages, supposedly from a “friend”, urge users to click on a link that leads to a fake log-in page. The same scenario has plagued Facebook at the same time Twitter got hit over the New Year weekend.

What good are Twitter log-in data and password, you wonder. For one, your stolen identity can be used to trick your friends to a website, where drive-by malware can be installed on their computers, turning the machines into zombies for spammers and hackers to send out more phishing e-mail messages or perform brute force attacks on corporate networks. Really, users have themselves to blame for such breaches.

It boogles the mind that they plaster globs of personal information online-from their pet’s names to names of schools they attended to pictures of themselves and close ones. It is bad enough they bring cyber disasters upon themselves. Some even offer the personal information of friends, who may not agree to such.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s brush with a hacker last September serves to remind netizens of the risks they take for revealing too much on online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace. Her personal info which was easily scraped off sites like Wikipedia and Photobucket was put online by anonymous enthusiasts, so it seems. The hacker simply reset her Yahoo e-mail password using her birth date, Zip code and information about where she met her husband to answer the security question posed by Yahoo.

Search engines like Yahoo and Google take snapshots of the Web pages that they index. Their cached pages linger for who knows how long. Unless you think bad publicity is better than no publicity, safeguard your personal information on social networks!