17-year old Australian schoolboy, Pearce Delphin, whose Twitter ID is @zzap, admitted to have started the hack attack on Twitter. Delphin lives with his parents in Melbourne and he got the idea from another user who used similar codes to make his profile and tweets rainbow colored.
Delphin said that he wrote a “mouseover” JavaScript code. It is a loop hole in the Twitter input system. Upon executed, it brings up a pop-up window. Soon the idea was picked up by hackers who tweaked the code which redirected users to porn website. The worm Tweet is replicated every time it is read.
The hack attack started on Twitter early morning on September 21, 2010 and devastated Twitter for the next five hours. Many users were affected by the Tweet warm.
In Britain, Lord Sugar and Sarah Brown, Britain’s former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s wife, and Robert Gibbs, Press Secretary, White House became victims of the attack.
Twitter quickly took steps and patched up the fault. A Japanese hacker named Masato Kinugawa, first reported about the fault in August and Twitter took necessary steps. Last week, the company released its newly designed web interface but it also had the same problem.
A security website named “Netcraft” traced to the code back to Delphin. He said "I did it merely to see if it could be done … that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet,……At the time of posting the tweet, I had no idea it was going to take off how it did. I just hadn't even considered it."
Delphin further said that hackers could even write code that would remain within Twitter’s 140 word limit and steal user ID and password but no such incident had been reported.
0 comments:
Post a Comment