New forms of web sites are arising on the internet daily. One popular site is Twitter, a site where users "Tweet" short messages 140 characters or less. It is microblogging or blogging simple statements. I am assuming a large portion of this blog's readers are avid users. Yahoo! reports that a 17 year old Australian teenager caused a storm on Twitter recently with a short, malicious Javascript code that was spread using Tweets.
Pearce Delphin, whose Twitter name is @zzap, admitted exposing a security flaw which was then pounced upon by hackers, affecting thousands of users and causing havoc on the microblogging site for about five hours.Delphin, who lives with his parents in Melbourne, said he tweeted a piece of "mouseover" JavaScript code which brings up a pop-up window when the user hovers their cursor over the message.
As is often found with computers, cutting edge things are performed by students messing around with simple computer code. I had a lot of computer scientist major friends in college that did similar things. This is an example where education enriches a person's life, but demonstrates that creativity is within. The young man was only in high school.
What is interesting about the incident is the extent which the code caused Twitter interruptions world wide. Once the genie escaped from the bottle, it was not returning. It eventually came back to haunt the code's creator.
Twitter apologised to its millions of users after the "mouseover bug" raged through the site, opening pop-up windows in Web browsers and automatically generating tweets from other accounts.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and Sarah Brown, wife of Britain's former prime minister Gordon Brown, were among those hit by the bug before engineers patched it up.
The "Netcraft" security website traced the malicious code back to Delphin, who said he got the idea from another user who employed a similar code to make his profile and tweets rainbow-coloured.
"After that, it seems like some of my followers realised the power of this vulnerability, and within a matter of minutes scripts had taken over my timeline," Delphin said.
It appears that the code was not used for malicious intent when hackers got a hold of the script. What is appropriate though is hackers used the script for one of the internet's biggest money generators, porn.
But the idea was soon taken up by hackers who tweaked the code to redirect users to pornographic sites and create "worm" tweets that replicated every time they were read.I think too often these kind of accidental discoveries are not utilized enough in our society. People have to have proper education and proper titles to have their ideas or products spread. This incident is proof creative tinkering requires no titles and limited education.
