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Twitter Hacked, Spread Worms and Delivered Porn

By Alvin Soon - on 22 Sep 2010, 11:10am

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.

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