An 17-year old Australian is taking responsibility for unwittingly causing yesterday's Twitter bug. While the teen didn't directly bring the flood of spam and porn retweets, he burst open the dam. I guess that passes for precociousness these days?


The trouble began when the Melbourne-based high school student decide to test the security flaw that created the havoc by tweeting some onMouseOver Javascript code. The vulnerability had first been brought to Twitter's attention a month ago</a? by the Japanese developer who first discovered it.


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But when this high school student tested it out for himself, more unsavory elements—specifically, his followers, according to Netcraft— quickly identified it as a means to a prank:

"After that, it seems like some of my followers realised the power of this vulnerability, and within a matter of minutes scripts had taken over my timeline," [the teen] said.

Which ultimately led to a worm that greeted visitors to Twitter.com with this:




You can't really blame the kid for his idle curiosity; if anything it forced Twitter to patch a vulnerability before something truly malicious took advantage of it. Let's hope we're so lucky next time. [Netcraft via AFP]