I’m sure that by now you’ve heard that the sudden spike in Twitter spam “appears to be due to the Gawker compromise”.  I’m not so sure.  I have a twitter account that has like 9 followers and it ended up with 2 outgoing spam messages on it.  However, I don’t have a Gawker account (nor any of the other web sites associated with it).  Yeah, I know I might have forgotten that I set one up on one of the many Gawker related sites, but when I enter my e-mail address (OK, addresses) I get a not found on all of them.  Add to this Gawkers assurance that the passwords were encrypted and the fact that my Twitter user ID is not the same as any of my other user ids, and I find it VERY suspicious.

So, if it wasn’t the Gawker leak that explains the Twitter storm today, what does?  My guess is that someone either hacked Twitters account system (or one of the software programs that posts Twitter messages for you) or there is a new way to send a Tweet that is attributable to someone else.  Who knows….

Why is Twitter blaming Gawker?  It could be as simple as “because they can”….