Discover, September 22 2010.
Yesterday’s Twitter meltdown was caused by a known flaw that resurfaced with the help of a 17-year-old Australian and a Scandinavian developer, among others. The boy, Pearce Delphin, and the developer, Magnus Holm, discovered the JavaScript vulnerability, which allowed hackers to make other users launch various functions merely by mousing over links in tweets sent by the hackers. Instead of reporting the vulnerability to Twitter, Delphin tweeted it–and it caught on.
“I did it merely to see if it could be done … that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet,” Delphin told AFP via email. “At the time of posting the tweet, I had no idea it was going to take off how it did. I just hadn’t even considered it.” Read More >