Twitter Closes Hole After Attack Hits Up To 500K Users

chicksdaddy writes "Twitter closed an ugly cross site scripting hole in its Web page Tuesday morning, but not until a fast moving attack, including at least two Twitter worms, compromised hundreds of thousands of user accounts. At its height, the attacks were hitting 100 Twitter users each second, putting estimates of the total number of victims at around 500,000 according to researchers at Kaspersky Lab."

Comments

Interesting, yet pointless

[pablo_max]

Really,I know a lot of people seem to be using twitter, but I just don't get it. Am I too old? Hell, I don't actually know anyone using it. At least I don't think I do.
Why are people so interested to read an internet based text message? Is it really better than reading a well thought out and reasoned article about something?

More and more I see on all these tech news sites and blogs that they heard from so and so's tweet that such and such will be released with this and this. Then, all the other news sites link to the first blog who is using twitter as a source of information.
Since when is a text message a reliable source of information?

Re:Interesting, yet pointless

[kaiser423]

Instead of having our captain for the team manage an ungodly email list for game times, updates, notifications, etc, he just has a twitter feed.

That way, it's hey you're new to the team, subscribe to @MySoccerTeamName and get all the info on when/where our games are, planning for team BBQ's, etc.

Because someone always changes an email, or someone gets all spam-infected and spews to the whole list or whatever and you have bounces, etc.

A twitter feed is just dead simple. It's also nice for quick updates; I couldn't make the game, but the captain tweeted a 5-2 win immediately after, so I got to see it.

It's incredibly nice; no need to visit a webpage or check your email or whatever, it's in a little app that everyone has on their phone or computer or whatever.

By my calculations

[ksandom]

that's ~81 minutes or just under an hour and a half. When was their discovery of the issue? If that's 1.5 hours from becoming aware of the issue to closing it, it's not terrible. What time of day was it at the office doing the maintenance? Was it even in office hours when someone would be there?