A 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?
The Melbourne-based high school student exposed the security flaw that created the havoc when he tweeted the onMouseOver Javascript code. It was an experiment, according to the teen, that more unsavoury elements quickly identified as a way to do this to anyone who accessed Twitter.com:
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. [AFP]
John Courier
Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 6:59 AMSo what did he do ? he posted a porn link then the new hover function automatically openned? how many followers did this guy have?
matt
Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 9:19 AMnow, what most people would take from something like this would be “wow, super leet intelligent hacker from Australia brings down twitter”
when really the story is “twitter security so laughably poor that one random, curious teenager was able to ‘hack’ it by just TWEETING CODE!!!”
Brad
Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 2:03 PMvery good :-P
MaDDoG
Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 4:55 PMYou know you watch to much porn when you instantly recognise the porn actress (Maria Ozawa) in the pic posted……..