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Miscreants broke into the Twitter profile of prominent advertising bloke Footloose star Kevin Bacon to scam his fans.

The 300,000-plus followers of the actor - who these days is just as well known for the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” trivia game as his starring roles in films such as Apollo 13 - were spammed with web links titled: "Did anyone else see this? She is way too young for that ‪[redacted]".‬ Victims who followed the URLs were taken to a bogus Twitter login page that would gobble up usernames and passwords.

"If you did find yourself clicking on the link, whose true destination had been hidden by use of the bit.do (not to be confused with bit.ly) URL shortening service, you would find your browser had taken you to what appeared to be a Twitter login page," explains veteran security watcher Graham Cluley.

Cluley has put together a blog post featuring screenshot of the hacked account and the fake Twitter login page it promoted here.

@kevinbacon is a verified account but that's doesn't mean it can't be hacked, using phishing or some other ruse. Thankfully Bacon managed to quickly regain his account, warned his fans and even managed to crack a funny about changing his password without trivialising the incident.

I was hacked tonight but thanks to your suggestions I changed my password to EggsN' and now I think I'm ok

— Kevin Bacon (@kevinbacon) August 12, 2013

Bacon is yet to delete the phishing posts from his tweet feed at the time of writing on Tuesday afternoon.

Previous celebrity victims of Twitter profile hijacking include such diverse figures as former Doctor who star Karen Gillan, Barack Obama and (repeatedly) Britney “Hit Hack Me One More Time” Spears. Hacking techniques applied to take over these accounts are a matter of guesswork, but are thought to include phishing, passwords shared with sites that become the victim of hacking attacks and in some cases keystroke-logging malware. ®

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