Hey, remember yesterday’s Twitter worm? Wasn’t that fun? Oh, don’t get all frowny, it was a blast.
Apparently, it was kicked off by Pearce Delphin, a 17-year-old Australian who honestly had no idea of the chaos that would ensue.
“I did it merely to see if it could be done,” Delphin told AFP. “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.”
The worm, which allowed JavaScript to be executed within a tweet, required only that a link was hovered over, not even clicked, to perform whatever instructions the tweet provided. Effects ranged from coloured tweets, to porn, to password extraction. For five hours, the Twitterverse was going absolutely bananas.
“I discovered a vulnerability, I didn’t create a self-replicating worm,” explained Delphin. “As far as I know, that isn’t technically illegal. Hopefully I won’t get in trouble!”
I, for one, am not willing to persecute Delphin – he had no malicious intent. And besides, it was a ton of fun watching that nonsense yesterday. Er, my condolences to anyone who got hit, of course.
Did anyone here feel the wrath of yesterday’s worm? What sort of effects did you experience?
