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Twitpic, the Internet messaging system based in Charleston, S.C., says it closed down parts of service to fix vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to access the stars' accounts and plant phony "tweets" indicating they had died, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.

The newspaper said Twitpic is a completely separate entity from the better-known Twitter but works with the same microblogging platform. The company told its users to disregard messages falsely announcing the death of Spears, and asserted it was "implementing a fix immediately."

The incident comes after a similar prank in which an unknown Web user going by the name of Hacker Croll broke into the Twitter accounts of Spears and other celebrities, gaining their e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers, the Telegraph reported.

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