Items tagged twitter, security in 2009
Filters: Year: 2009 × twitter × security × Sorted by date
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack. Long-winded explanation of the recent Twitter break-in, but you can scroll to the bottom for a numbered list summary. The attacker first broke in to a Twitter employee’s personal Gmail account by “recovering” it against an expired Hotmail account (which the attacker could hence register themselves). They gained access to more passwords by searching for e-mails from badly implemented sites that send you your password in the clear. # 20th July 2009, 12:55 am
17-year-old claims responsibility for Twitter worm. It was a text book XSS attack—the URL on the user profile wasn’t properly escaped, allowing an attacker to insert a script element linking out to externally hosted JavaScript which then used Ajax to steal any logged-in user’s anti-CSRF token and use it to self-replicate in to their profile. # 12th April 2009, 7:22 pm
Twitter Don’t Click Exploit. Someone ran a successful ClickJacking exploit against Twitter users, using a transparent iframe holding the Twitter homepage with a status message fed in by a query string parameter. Thiss will definitely help raise awareness of ClickJacking! Twitter has now added framebusting JavaScript to prevent the exploit. # 12th February 2009, 7:56 pm
Rate limiting with memcached
On Monday, several high profile “celebrity” Twitter accounts started spouting nonsense, the victims of stolen passwords. Wired has the full story—someone ran a dictionary attack against a Twitter staff member, discovered their password and used Twitter’s admin tools to reset the passwords on the accounts they wanted to steal.
[... 910 words]Weak Password Brings “Happiness” to Twitter Hacker. The full story on the Twitter admin account hack. I bet there are a LOT of web applications out there that don’t track and rate-limit failed password attempts. # 7th January 2009, 12:04 pm
The Twitter administrator hack was a dictionary attack. I quoted Blaine earlier suggesting that the recent Twitter mass-hack was due to a Twitter admin password being scooped up by a rogue third party application—this was not the case, as Alex Payne explains in a comment. # 6th January 2009, 11:56 pm
As more details become available, it seems what happened is that a Twitter administrator (i.e., employee) gave their password to a 3rd party site because their API requires it, which was then used to compromise Twitter’s admin interface.
— Blaine Cook # 6th January 2009, 9:37 am
The username/password key’s major disadvantage is that it open all the doors to the house. The OAuth key only opens a couple doors; the scope of the credentials is limited. That’s a benefit, to be sure, but in Twitter’s case, a malicious application that registered for OAuth with both read and write privileges can do most evil things a user might be worried about.
— Alex Payne # 5th January 2009, 10:47 am
Antipatterns for sale. Twply collected over 800 Twitter usernames and passwords (OAuth can’t arrive soon enough) and was promptly auctioned off on SitePoint to the highest bidder. # 2nd January 2009, 10:48 am