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Aussie Student Responsible For Twitter Exploit

Posted by samzenpus on from the little-troublemaker dept.

bennyboy64 writes "An Australian teen has caused havoc on Twitter by discovering an exploit that hit thousands of users, including Barack Obama's press secretary, and resulted in the tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Pearce Delphin, who is studying his last year at high school, said that he was surprised that 'so many famous people got infected.'"

2 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. "Responsible" by iONiUM · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary kind of makes it sound like he's a kid who was looking for exploits and then used it to make a virus. This doesn't seem to be the case at all. According to the TFA he saw some people using CSS in their twitter posts, and wondered if he could use HTML/JavaScript (as I would be too). He found he could, did some experimenting, and his followers then started doing it too and it went viral (the idea), and then some malicious people found it, and went viral (the code).

    I assume no punishment is being leveraged against him, but I'm sure many will misunderstand what happened and call for it anyways. Curiosity should be encouraged.

  2. Not exactly by Shyfer · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article says he is the one that discovered the exploit, but he did not create the script that made 'tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn'. Just to clarify.