Popular micro-blogging site Twitter has been hit by yet more security
incidents over the Easter weekend, although the intention seems to have been
mischief rather than password harvesting this time.
The site suffered from three attacks targeting a cross-site scripting flaw.
The worm, dubbed 'StalkDaily', seems to have been created as a publicity stunt
by Michael 'Mikeyy' Mooney, the owner of a Twitter-style site of the same name.
"At about 2AM on Saturday, four accounts were created that began spreading a
worm on Twitter," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the Twitter
blog
yesterday.
"From 7:30AM until 11AM PST, our security team worked on eliminating the
vectors that could identify this worm. At that time, about 90 accounts were
compromised. We identified and secured these accounts."
The worm spread by encouraging users to click on a link to visit the
StalkDaily.com site. When they did, their own profiles became infected and sent
out similar spam-type messages to their contacts.
A second wave of the worm hit the same afternoon, compromising 100 more
accounts, wrote Stone. Then yet another bout of attacks hit on Sunday.
"Our team quickly pulled together and started fighting the attackers in real
time," wrote Stone. "Again, we secured the accounts that had been compromised
and removed any content that might help spread the worm. All told, we identified
and deleted almost 10,000 tweets that could have continued to spread the worm."
Stone said that Twitter is conducting a full review of what happened and that
it is constantly re-evaluating its web coding practices "to learn how we can do
better to prevent them in the future".
Mikko Hyponnen, chief research officer at anti-malware firm F-Secure, warned
users not to follow suspicious links.
"This is not over," he wrote on the firm's
blog.
"There's going to be quite a few modified Twitter worms for a day or two. Be
careful in Twitter."
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