An 17-year old Australian is taking responsibility for unwittingly causing yesterday’s Twitter bug. While the teen didn’t directly bring the flood of spam and porn retweets, he burst open the dam. I guess that passes for precociousness these days?
https://gizmodo.com/there-was-a-new-twitter-exploit-and-it-was-spreading-li-5643732
The trouble began when the Melbourne-based high school student decide to test the security flaw that created the havoc by tweeting some onMouseOver Javascript code. The vulnerability had first been brought to Twitter’s attention a month ago
http://gawker.com/5644077/how-twitter-hatched-a-virus-that-reached-the-white-house
But when this high school student tested it out for himself, more unsavory elements—specifically, his followers, according to Netcraft— quickly identified it as a means to a prank:
“After that, it seems like some of my followers realised the power of this vulnerability, and within a matter of minutes scripts had taken over my timeline,” [the teen] said.
Which ultimately led to a worm that greeted visitors to Twitter.com with this:
You can’t really blame the kid for his idle curiosity; if anything it forced Twitter to patch a vulnerability before something truly malicious took advantage of it. Let’s hope we’re so lucky next time. [Netcraft via AFP]
