Twitter was under a string of worm attacks on Sunday that were created by different intruders including a 17-year-old Brooklyn resident Michael, who took the responsibility of creating two of them that caused to show some unwanted messages on Twitter.
“MikeyyMikeyy is done ….Mikeyy I am done,” and “Twitter please fix that” were messages that were seen by some users’ pages on early Sunday.
However, security engineers at the emerging social networking site have succeeded to clean the site, but they took enough time in fixing them as Michael said that he couldn’t expect that Twitter security engineers would take so much time to fix the issues.
In a post at Twitter blog, co-founder Biz Stone says “The first attack was launched on early Saturday and that emerged from four new accounts that compromised nearly 90 accounts.
These worms didn’t cause any serious harm, except modifying profile pages and spreading to the followers of the users.
Till Saturday afternoon, nearly 100 further accounts compromised in the next wave of the attack that followed another on Sunday morning. Stone says that almost 10,000 infected tweets that caused to spread the worm have been deleted from the site.
On Monday morning, another serious attack was launched on the site and according to Stone they secured the compromised accounts and deleted all such materials that could propagate the worm further. The worm seems to damage a cross-site scripting that is a common vulnerability in the web applications.
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The repetitive worm attacks on Twitter have surfaced the weaknesses in the security system of the site. It is important for its engineers to make the site more robust to avoid inconvenience and breach of security keeping interests and privacy of its users in mind.
Also they should be fully prepared and equipped to tackle such issues on a short notice rather than take so long to solve the problem.