Monday brought gifts from the Blogger Gods, as a string of Twitter hackings relayed such one-sentence newsflashes as "Britney Spears['s vagina is] about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth," and "Bill O'Reilly is gay."

Now Wired's Threat Level blog has the inside story of how it all went down. The hacker's handle is GMZ (no relation to the AOL dirt-hub), a clever 18-year-old who used a rather primitive but effective system to break in. Noticing that Twitter allowed unlimited login attempts, he fashioned a program that would feed English words into the account of a frequent Twitter follower named Crystal. The next morning, "happiness" did the trick, but GMZ learned he hadn't just hacked into any account—Crystal was a Twitter staffer with full administrative access.

Realizing he had access to reset any account's password and login, GMZ did the responsible thing: He threw it open to hacker forum Digital Gangster, offering access to any account by request:

President-Elect Barack Obama was among the most popular requests from Digital Gangster denizens, with around 20 members asking for access to the election campaign account. After resetting the password for the account, he gave the credentials to five people.

He also filled requests for access to Britney Spears' account, as well as the official feeds for Facebook, CBS News, Fox News and the accounts of CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez and Digg founder Kevin Rose. Other targets included additional news outlets and other celebrities. Fox won the hacker popularity contest, beating out even Obama and Spears. According to Twitter, 33 high-profile accounts were compromised in all.

That means that the poet behind the Britney vagina tweet was not the same author as the minimalist O'Reilly entry, in case you had trouble rectifying their wildly differing voices. Let this be a lesson to you all: a word in the dictionary is not a secure password. Make it eight characters, mixing letters and numbers—otherwise anyone can break in to your account and pass off outrageous statements like "Fred 62 is so good" as your own.