A Twitter attack advertising acai-berries has hijacked thousands of Twitter accounts and turned them into spammers.

The attack is spreading at a rapid pace — within a minute, more than 10,000 tweets related to the attack have popped up on the microblogging service. These tweets link to domains containing “acainews.” and clicking the link may get you more than a way to lose nine pounds quickly!

There is speculation that the hack stems from another hack that was confirmed last night. Gawker Media has confirmed that their servers were rooted by a band of anonymous hackers known as Gnosis.

Gnosis gave a thumbs up to last week's Operation Payback, which targeted PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and other companies that severed ties with WikiLeaks. A 20,000-word manifesto available by BitTorrent over the weekend contained email and Twitter log-in credentials for Nick Denton and other top knobs at Gawker, as well as logins for thousands of Gawker's registered readers.

The group also posted ““You would think someone like Nick Denton who likes to run his mouth and taunts such an unforgiving mass like Anonymous, would use a more secure password than '24862486. The sad thing is he probably believes this password is 'secure' because he likes to use it everywhere!” end quote.... Ouch!

Gawker's front page contained this warning saying: “Our user databases appear to have been compromised.” It advised readers to consider their accounts compromised across all of Gawker's federation of websites and to change passwords as soon as possible.” end

Change your passwords often

Changing your password both regularly, and utilizing an irregular mix of symbols, numbers, and both upper and lower case letters for complexity can not be overstated. Use one of the password safes available to store your passwords. Never use the same passwords at secure sites that you use at a site where you are posting comments! Some people at Gawkers are wishing they heeded what should now be common knowledge for anyone surfing the web.