Home » Tech News

Twitter Confirms Auto-Follow Bug, Promises a Quick Fix

by | Monday, 10th May 2010 | Comment | Share

Twitter confirmed a security vulnerability today which allows people to force twitter accounts to follow them.  One of the first few accounts to be attacked by this bug were those of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Their accounts were pointed to a dummy account which was created for this purpose.

To make use of this exploit, all we needed to do was to send out a tweet as “accept @username” to make any username follow us on Twitter. The bug was first spotted by a turkish blog which was made popular on Twitter by @hasanbasusta. This bug was tested on this blog with a dummy account which was given Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Mark Zuckersberg and Evan Williams as followers.

To resolve this issue, Twitter first fixed this bug and then moved on to mend the fake followings. Though, it could not see any possible way of doing that and had to reset the follower count to 0 to prevent any outrage. In the meanwhile Gizmodo found out that this bug works for the web interface only and not with the API.

Finally, it seems that the issue is resolved now and there are some numbers appearing beside the follower/following counts. Finally, we all can go back to safe tweeting once again.
(Via: Cnet)

  • Share

Related Topics Similar to This Article: »

Recent Activity: »

Read More On: , ,

Author:

Chinmoy Kanjilal is a FOSS enthusiast and evangelist. He is passionate about Android. Security exploits turn him on and he loves to tinker with computer networks. He rants occasionally at Techarraz.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @ckandroid.

Chinmoy Kanjilal has written

The author of this post can be contacted at chinmoy@techie-buzz.com

Comment Using Facebook

Be The First to Share your Opinions/Comments

We moderate comments to prevent spam. Moderation is done within few hours. Please try and stay on topic and refrain from using abusive language. If you think there is a problem with this post, please email the post author or send us an email at tips@techie-buzz.com with the URL and the problem you see and we will rectify it as soon as we can.