No stranger to a hacked Twitter account, actor Ashton Kutcher is taking the latest incident in stride, and, true to form, inviting the public to watch him punk the perpetrator.
Kutcher sent the Hollywood gossip machine in motion yesterday with a series of tweets saying he was having his "first official sleepover" with his new girlfriend, actress and screenwriter Lorene Scafaria. Though it's whispered the two have been dating since the "Two and a Half Men" star split with Demi Moore, celebrity websites ran with the story as soon as Kutcher supposedly confirmed it to his millions of Twitter fans.
The Twitter announcement, however, didn't come from Kutcher's @aplusk account. He took to Twitter, of course, to clear up the controversy.
"So apparently someone thinks they are clever hacking my account," he wrote. He followed it with another taunting message: "Ok mr hacker, you only made one mistake. You hacked my Foursquare and I now know your address. Whoops…This is gonna be fun." Both tweets, along with the three that kicked off the controversy, were removed, Radar Online reported.
A single message on Scafaria's Twitter feed says, "Guys, it was a hacker. That was mean. This is boring."
But most important, and what is certainly not boring, is a message Kutcher posted alerting his followers to the alleged hacker's address. Posted yesterday morning (Jan. 15), the message says, "I'm coming for you my friend… #hacker," with a link to a picture of a map of the purported hacker's address in Hawthorne, Calif.
Also falling victim to the whims of a weekend hacker was the Huffington Post, which someone briefly took over yesterday to post a series of offensive, homophobic messages, including, "hello gay boys."
The hacker, calling himself "cloverfdch," controlled @HuffingtonPost for a few minutes, until the site's administrator's locked him out.
If there's a lesson to be learned, Kutcher apparently hasn't learned it — his Twitter account has been taken over several times, putting him in company with other celebrities including Lil Wayne, Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears, all of whom have had their feeds compromised.
For the rest of us, the noncelebrity Twitter and social media users, the lesson is this: Secure your account with a strong, difficult-to-guess password, and don't use the same password on all your online accounts.