Microblogging Mormons are up in arms after the Twitter account of the Church of Latter Day Saints was hijacked by pranksters.

Scallywags broke into the profile, probably by taking advantage of a weak password, to post tweets suggesting that the founder of the church, Joseph Smith, was a liar. Mendacious updates to the @LDSChurchNews feed suggested Smith had fabricated translations of sacred texts.

A report by Church News, the official news site of the LDS Church, confirmed that the Mormons shut down the compromised account on Thursday after it was hijacked by hackers last weekend. The church found it tricky to track down Twitter administrators but received a sympathetic hearing once they did get in touch.

It's unclear when the suspended account, which had been active for about two months, will be restored.

Twitter profile hacking, more generally, is becoming increasingly commonplace. Previous victims have included the New York Times and Britney Spears, among many others. ®

Related stories

• Twitter-based mafia game irritates world+dog (22 September 2009)
• Twitter starts filtering links to malware sites (3 August 2009)
• Month Of Twitter Bugs exposes microblogging flaws (3 July 2009)
• Britney Spears dead hacked (29 June 2009)
• Comment Iran's revolution will not be televised, but could be tweeted (16 June 2009)
• Dell tweets $3m in revenues (12 June 2009)
• Twitter fights celeb imposters with Verified Account scheme (8 June 2009)
• Twitter Trends exploited to promote scareware (4 June 2009)
• Hacker disrupts economy of annoying Twitter-based game (3 June 2009)
• Twitter typosquatting site preys on gullible (21 May 2009)
• Deleted Tweets found living in the hereafter (19 May 2009)
• Twitter breach gives behind-the-scenes Obama peek (30 April 2009)
• Twitter riddled with worms and scams (again) (20 April 2009)
• Kanye West blames Gmail hijack for bisexual porn hoax (26 January 2009)
• Password guessing attack exposed in Twitter pwn (7 January 2009)
• Twitter's veracity chewed up by Britney's four-foot vagina (6 January 2009)