If you build it, they will come…including hackers.

Twitter is quickly becoming one of the most popular social networking sites on the web, so it’s not surprise that it has its share of hackers now wanting to test its mettle.

TechCrunch reported this morning that 33 high profile accounts were hacked, with crazy, bogus status messages being posted, supposedly by the users. This follows on the heels of a phishing scam (a scam to trick users into giving their personal info) that came to light over the weekend targeting Twitter users.

Twitter assures us that they now have the problems under control. The Phishing scam was stopped by Twitter changing a whole bunch of passwords, and the hacked amin tools were taken offline to stop the other problem. They’re also working on a password authentication system to give users more security when using open source apps (tools developed by third parties).

To help protect yourself from similar scams, remember to sign-in to Twitter and other websites by going to the website directly (rather than clicking on a link in an e-mail), to update your passwords frequently with passwords that contain non-obvious letters and numbers and do not store them on your hard drive, and to be very careful to use only third party applications that come highly recommended by trusted sources. Even in taking these precautions, there are no guarantees (these steps may not have protected users from the above-mentioned scams), so always be sure to keep your firewall and virus protections up-to-date.