You may not realize it, but you and I are antibodies. Or maybe we're white blood cells. Leukocytes? Killer T cells? I know we're definitely not germs.
I'm talking about yesterday's Twitter worm, which both spread and was contained very quickly due to the viral nature of that network. Apparently Twitter users are not merely part of the problem, they're also part of the solution, biologically speaking.
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Per Computerworld's Gregg Keizer:
The remarkable speed with which several worms spread on Twitter on Tuesday may have sent opportunistic spammers scurrying to exploit a quickly patched vulnerability, but cyber criminals looking for ways to hijack PCs essentially steered clear.
Why?
"Social networks have built-in antibodies...their users," said Sean Sullivan of the Finnish security company F-Secure. "Compare the Twitter attack to a malicious attack of yesteryear that took weeks or even months to develop. This peaked and ebbed in two and a half hours," Sullivan said.
In case you were having a life and missed it, the attack that raged across Twitter yesterday morning was spread by tweets containing a small bit of JavaScript code that opens new browser windows when you roll your mouse cursor over it. This is a cross-site-scripting flaw that was identified and fixed by Twitter almost a month ago, then accidentally reintroduced as part of a recent patch to the site.
The Twitter attack was mostly harmless. Some caused people's tweets to become color coded -- but others tweaked the JavaScript for more nefarious purposes. The most notorious attack infected the Twitter account of Sarah Brown, wife of the ex-British prime minister, and redirected her 1.2 million followers to a Japanese porn site.
