Jedward go X-rated in porn attack

The X Factor twins, who have more than 80,000 followers on the site, were the victims of a perverted hacker.

The boys' hugely popular site was hacked yesterday with fans being inadvertently directed to a Japanese pornography site.

A link appeared on their page as a recent post, and it is believed that several of their fans caught an eyeful of the X-rated images.

However, due to their borderline obsession to the micro-blogging site, they were able to intervene relatively quickly and delete the link before more people were directed to the page.

"Our twitter is hacked, some loser is trying to mess up our twitter dont click on links we will tell you when its back to normal," they wrote afterwards.

But the zany 19-year-olds weren't the only victims of yesterday's vicious attack -- broadcaster Joe Duffy's page also directed nearly 3,000 of his followers to the seedy site.

However, fans of the Liveline host only had to roll over the link for the images to pop up on screen, making it even more accessible.

The Irish stars were among the 200,000 Twitter users hit by the hacker, which prompted the website to issue a statement warning users to steer clear of their accounts until the problem had been resolved.

Affected

"We expect the patch to be rolled out shortly," it read.

The wife of the former British prime minister Sarah Brown and White House press chief Robert Gibbs were also affected.

Later, it was a case of Miriam O'Callaghan to the rescue, when the Twitter devotee took to her account to post tips on how to ward off hackers.

It is believed that the sites were accessed due to a "worm" exposed by Norwegian computer programmer Magnus Holm.

The entire website just underwent a massive redesign and he said he just wanted to highlight the flaw in their security system.

Holm said that he intended no harm, but "wanted to experiment with the flaw".

However, he admitted that hackers soon realised the vulnerability of the site and used it to their advantage.

cmcbride@herald.ie