Things have been going a bit crazy on Twitter today with accounts suddenly taking on a life of their own, tweeting spam and redirecting people to random pages. Obviously this has caused a bit of concern for all involved and masses of Tweets are urging everyone to stay off the main Twitter page, though applications such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite seem safe (though they still have to put up with nonsensical tweets). So what’s going on? Well there’s a good explanation here from one of the first people to spot this type of thing way back in 2009, but the long and short of it seems to be that people can create tweets that, when simply rolled over, carry out an action on your Twitter account.
What it can do
This is some seriously heinous stuff, as all you have to do is point your mouse at a Tweet for the maliciousness to start it’s work and there are plenty of ways for it to ruin your day. It can delete all of your followers, change passwords, redirect you to Japanese porn sites (as apparently happened to Sarah Brown of ‘wife of Gordon Brown’ fame), or send itself to all of your followers as well. This could seriously.
What could this mean?
Well, putting my tabloid hat on, the monstrous, medusa-like, character of this issue (you only need to look at it to turn into stone/be redirected to Japanese porn) could panic lots of Twitter uses and see the service wane in popularity, dealing a blow to every Twitter-orientated marketing venture.
What it probably will mean
It would be interesting to see what happens to traffic over the next few days on Twitter, while they get everything fixed, but it would seem that plenty of people are perfectly safe monitoring things from 3rd party applications. Twitter will hopefully nip this in the bud, but with one of the best things about Twitter being the happy benevolence that it exudes through endorsements from celebrities like Stephen Fry and it’s facilitation of free speech in media blackouts across the world, it could be a rude awakening to many when it turns out that Twitter is just as dangerous a service as everything else on the web.
