Ashton's Twitter: Punk'd by Hackers

Ashton Kutcher’s famous Twitter account was “punk’d” by hackers Wednesday while Kutcher attended TED 2011, ‘The Rediscovery of Wonder’ conference in Long Beach.

The incident gave Kutcher and his nearly 6.4 million followers even more reason to ponder one specific topic: online security.

The first tweet, taunted, “Dude, where’s my SSL?” and the second proclaimed the act was an homage to young protesters throughout the world whose social media accounts had been hacked by governments.

Gizmodo’s Roas Goilijan speculates Kutcher was targeted by something like “Firesheep” a browser-hijacking extension. Given his location at TED (and proximity to loads intellectuals and tech-savvy visitors), Kutcher may have been easy prey for what is called a “sidehack.”

Basically, when two people are using social media apps or sites like Facebook or Twitter over unecrypted Wi-Fi networks, they have the ability to hack into each other’s accounts.

Kutcher, who has been known to make social statements on Twitter and could be credited with starting the art of Celebrity Twitter Wars, has yet to respond via Tweet.