Twitter Hacked, Spread Worms and Delivered Porn
Twitter Hacked, Spread Worms and Delivered Porn
The Twitter website was hacked Tuesday morning, causing messages to pop up and websites to load automatically. From the New York Times:
The first worm of this kind appears to have been launched Tuesday morning by Magnus Holm, a Norwegian Ruby programmer who uses the Twitter handle @judofyr. His post contained only a link, which had the embedded command “onmouseover,” a JavaScript command that caused the link to be automatically Tweeted by anyone whose mouse cursor touched it. In an e-mail, Mr. Holm said he created the worm “because I wanted to experiment with the flaw,” which he says was already being exploited by others. “The purpose was simply to see if it was possible to create a worm.”
The first worm further inspired others to start attacks of their own, one re-directing a link on Sarah Brown's - wife of the previous British prime minister Gordon Brown - Twitter page to a Japanese porn site. As of late Tuesday the security flaw which enabled the attack has been patched. Check out the New York Times link for more.