TWITTER GOT HACKED!

Twitter was hacked Tuesday morning - and the culprit may be a 'Rick-Roller' with a penchant for Rick Astley pranks.
The hack attack caused many users to unwittingly engage in a deluge of retweets and an explosion of redirects, as well as tweets on their feeds that helped spread the assault to their followers. Fox News reported that that some of the redirects sent users to explicit websites.

A source told Fox News that "tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of messages" had been posted to Twitter as a result of the hack.


The Toronto Sun reported that the malicious attack originated from Twitter user @Matsta, and that the website for Matsta.org directs users to the Rick Astley Never Gonna Give You Up' music video. Misdirecting internet users to this video has for years been an online practical joke known as 'Rick-Rolling'.

The Twitter account for @Matsta has been suspended since this morning's Twitter attack.

Another Twitter user, @Vovse, has been retweeted across the Twitterverse as part of the attack. It is unclear what his relationship was to the attack, but some of his tweets appear to apologize for the spam. “This was really not that I supposed to be. Sorry once again," he wrote in one tweet.

Celebrities affected by the Twitter attack included White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Sarah Brown, wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Both the Daily News and a Daily News staff member -- while using the old version of Twitter, not the new version Twitter has recently begun to unroll -- were affected by the hack. On both accounts, large solid-colored swirls appeared on the page. Without clicking anything, a Newser watched her account automatically retweet messages and attempt to send direct messages to others after she simply moved the mouse across the screen.

Attempts to sign out led to an error screen, then a website called Freeze.com.

Only the Twitter website was affected, so users of third-party applications such as TweetDeck remained out of harm's way.

According to Twitter, the damage has been undone.

"The XSS attack should now be fully patched and no longer exploitable," Del Harvey of the website's Trust and Safety Team tweeted.