The Twitter account of the popular web site, The Oatmeal, was apparently hacked earlier today.
Taking over its timeline with pornographic tweets, the hacker changed the profile to a “Janice Perry“.
Oatmeal’s Twitter account has more than 538,000 followers, many of which engage with the fun, cartoon content its owner posts.
Its owner, Matt Inman, was taking a break and went camping for two days, turning his cellphone off. In the meantime, an auto-posting bot that took over his Twitter account started tweeting porn.
He has yet to remove the latest tweets.
The URL-shortened content is linked to the web site AdultOnline-Dating.xyz, which was registered to a Russian the day the XYZ Registry launched a penny per domain promotion.
All of the following .XYZ domains are also registered to the same email account, for a total cost of 16 cents:
adult-datingonline.xyz
adult-online.xyz
adultdating-online.xyz
adultonline-dating.xyz
dating-adultonline.xyz
datingonlinesex.xyz
datingsexonline.xyz
online-adult.xyz
online-adultdating.xyz
online-datingsex.xyz
onlinedating-adult.xyz
onlinesex-dating.xyz
sex-datingonline.xyz
sex-onlinedating.xyz
sexonline-dating.xyz
sexwithoutcommitment.xyz
The pornographic domains are used for affiliate linking to web sites that pay for account signups.
Their function is to store a cookie in the visitor’s browser which can track eventual sign-ups; that’s how the perpetrator most likely planned to monetize the sizable Oatmeal traffic on Twitter.
The Oatmeal Twitter account got compromised.
