Don't Click The WTF Link On Twitter Unless You DO Like Sex With Goats

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Either a lot of Techies are into really kinky things, or there is a Twitter worm going around. It looks like a ton of people just started sending out Tweets saying “I Like Anal Sex With Goats.” This Tweet is followed by another one that says “WTF” and includes a link. Do NOT click on this link; it appears that it will cause you to send out the same series of Tweets from your account. It looks like this is happening across third-party clients and on Twitter.com

As commenter Andrew Nacin points out, the bug is called a cross-site request forgery. Web programming security 101. It should only affect twitter.com, as it relies on an iframe of twitter.com and a little JavaScript to post the tweet form (twice). It seems that if you click this link “http://pastehtml.com/view/1b7xk3b.html”, and you are signed into Twitter, it will autotweet two Tweets with the sex with goats bit and the WTF link.

UPDATE: Twitter just posted this message on their Status blog, stating “A malicious link is making the rounds that will post a tweet to your account when clicked on. Twitter has disabled the link, and is currently resolving the issue.”

UPDATE 2: Twitter has fixed the exploit and are removing the “offending Tweets.”

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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