Flaw Makes Twitter Vulnerable To Serious Viral Attack
Micro-blogging site Twitter suffers from a potentially devastating vulnerability that forces logged-in users to post messages of an attacker’s choice simply by clicking on a link. It could be used to spawn a self-replicating worm.
The XSS, or cross-site scripting, error was discovered by Secure Sciences Corp researchers Lance James and Eric Wastl, who have fashioned this link to demonstrate their finding. Clicking on it while logged in to Twitter causes users to immediately broadcast an innocuous message to all of their followers, as this dummy account shows.
Of course, it would be just as easy to craft links that do considerably more damage. Tweets are limited to just 140 characters, making it almost mandatory to use shortened URLs that obscure their final destination. While it’s possible to preview the link before visiting, many Twitter users have grown so accustomed to them they click on them directly.
As the user base of Twitter has skyrocketed, so too have attempts to exploit the site. Hackers have waged cat-and-mouse attacks on the site using so-called clickjacking exploits that, like the XSS vulnerability exposed by James and Wastl, forced logged-in users to tweet simply by clicking on an innocent-looking button. Twitter has been quick to patch the vulnerabilities, but the hackers have been known to launch new attacks that work around the countermeasures.
More than 15 hours after this story was first published, the gaping hole remained.
Credit: The Register
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