I had a look at my twitter page early this morning and read “Twitter is a rich source of insanity”, and thought “Wow, the twitter marketroids are really bold, but it’s a good line.”
Upon re-reading, however, I realized that what it really said was
“Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information.”
It might, however, have been a Freudian slip, because twitter got hacked yesterday, and bunches of celebs found they had been forced to follow the hacker. Even worse, as it struggled to right the ship, twitter temporarily removed their followers, and celebs found themselves in the traumatic position of being unpopular, at least for a while.
I’ve not yet seen the details of how the attack/ bug worked, and I’ll update this blog as soon as I do, but it does highlight three things:
(1) While this attack was relatively harmless, the attacker could have directed everyone to a page full of drive-by downloads and exploits, and
(2) Social networks are inherently viral… they spread stuff all by themselves. Just last week, we discovered some Facebook apps that were spreading via Friend lists to install adware (this has now diminished… shout-outs to FB for disabling the apps as soon as we pointed them out), and
(3) The Web is the current attack surface of choice. Install and use a Site Advisor.
Today, however, the ether is no longer perturbed, and all is well again with the possible exception of those celebs who were traumatized.
I wonder if any will need re-hab?
🙂