I had a very strange experience on Twitter this afternoon when I unwittingly seemed to be retweeting without any control…. I have just seen though in the Mail Online that I was obviously caught up in a massive worm that hackers had created to redirect users to new websites.
As you can see in the article ‘Twitter ‘mouseover’ worm redirects hundreds of thousands of users to porn sites’, the bug works when the mouse hovers over a chunk of ‘infected’ text – you don’t even have to actually clink on a link.
Apparently thousands were infected, including the former prime minister’s wife Sarah Brown and the White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs.
The worm was apparently a cross-site scripting (XSS) bug which basically means the virus was used to launch simple pop-up windows, redirect users to porn sites and to also cover up users’ tweets with blocks of colour.
Whilst the worm was attacking, experts recommended that users use third party apps rather than visit the Twitter site itself.
According to Twitter the security breach has now been fixed – thank goodness, but it just goes to show what can happen and how careful you need to be with using websites, even a high calibre social networking site such as Twitter.