Posts
Ben Grubb
September 22, 2010
UPDATE
An Australian teen has caused havoc on Twitter by discovering an "exploit" that hit thousands of users, including US President Barack Obama's press secretary, and resulted in the tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn.
Melbourne student Pearce Delphin, 17, triggered the Twitter scare by testing computer code that opened alert boxes in web browsers saying "uh oh" when a user hovered over infected messages or tweets, with their mouse.
But later, some mischievous users of the site started using the exploit to make people "retweet" infected messages (when they hovered over a tweet with the code inserted) that they had not authorised.
Twitter engineers were pressed into finding a fix for the exploit within hours of it being discovered.
Speaking to this website, Pearce, who is studying year 12 at Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School, said that he was surprised that "so many famous people got infected". He said it was Twitter's responsibility, not his, to keep the site secure.
"When one considers entities like the White House, you don't expect someone to actually be sitting there refreshing the Twitter home page and mousing over links from whoever they're following," he said. "I guess regardless of power or fame, on the internet you have to be as careful as everyone else about security risks; this is one of the few areas that affects everyone on an equal scale."
Read the full & fascinating story:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/australian-teen-triggers-global-twi...
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