Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Twitter the Latest Hacking Victim

It was only a matter of time, but it has now been confirmed that Twitter has fallen victim it a well planned hacker attack, which caused some short term but considerable disruptions to their services.

As had been feared would happen, even by Twitter's security team, the social networking site eventually fell victim to what is known as a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. XSS is a hacker developed piece of software used to implant code from a tainted website into another one. The hackers used XSS to submit some javascript code disguised as plain text into an innocent looking "Tweet" The end result that was that the tainted tweet ran though the network like a dose of salts, causing considerable disruption.

First signs that Tweeter had been compromised came when tweets began to appear in different and unfamiliar colours. The nest step in the infiltration was activated when site visitors who "moused over" any of the links on Twitter would activate a pop-up box containing some fairly "un-Twitterish" messages.

As more and more amateur hackers got wind that Twitter had been hacked and the flaw had yet to be patched, the number and range of the worms injected into the system very rapidly.

While the infiltration was basically harmless and rapidly acted upon by Tweeter and their security staff, once again the message goes out that no application is safe from online hacking, and while this incident was far from problematic the next one may well not be.

That is the reason why anyone who Tweets, uses Facebook or any other service that the internet provides needs to make sure that their computer is protected against viruses, in the many forms that they can take. There are as many talented and profit hungry computer programmes on the "dark side" of the industry as there are whose role it is to create programs, design social networks or simply pass on the latest news and views on a unbelievably wide range of subjects.

These services do not come without a price, and the minimum price that needs to be paid is to make sure that your computer, as well as the computers that are attached to it, are being protected. And the only way to ensure their protection is to install a professional, reliable anti-virus software program.

That way the next tweet you get will be from a friend.

 

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