Twitter Hacked: Twitter Virus Spreads in Internet this Tuesday
Posted on 22. Sep, 2010 by Barbara Aniston in Technology
What is happening with Twitter this Tuesday morning when you log-in? It seems that Twitter was overrun with thousands of tweets that even used a programming flaw just to play pranks and spread worms and viruses to very unsuspecting Twitter users.
Apparently, around 10 am, the Twitter safety feed advised that the popular social networking site was being hacked and this caused the site not to work properly. But thankfully, the virus attack only affected users through Twitter.com and not the other third-party programs that are available for sending and receiving tweets.
And it was confirmed already that only users of Twitter.com itself were being affected and nobody using third-party software clients, which represent the majority of the users, were infected because such programs correctly escaped the URL.
Unfortunately, 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.
“We’ve identified and are patching a XSS attack; as always, please message @safety if you have info regarding such an exploit.”
Sarah Brown, the wife of the former British Prime Minister was among the pranks that was being ensnared by the said Twitter virus. A link on her Twitter page redirected visitors to a hardcore Japanese adult site, a report confirmed by blog of Graham Cluley. Cluley said that there were tens of thousands of dodgy links circulating on Twitter now.
Now, the security experts are recommending the users to temporarily avoid the Twitter site and instead use a third-party Twitter client like TweetDeck just to access the service of the said social networking site.