Twitter Worm Sends Users to Porn Site

A worm, designed by Magnus Holm, a Norwegian hacker created havoc at the social networking site because users are swamped by pop up messages and pornographic site. According to the security expert,  a JavaScript command in the offending posts included a command, “onmouseover,” that caused messages to pop up and Web sites to open automatically when the user mouse over it. Simultaneously, user is redirected to the new porn sites. Magnus announced his achievement in a Tweet.

In an e-mail, Mr. Holm said he created the worm “because I wanted to experiment with the flaw,” which he says was already being exploited by others. “The purpose was simply to see if it was possible to create a worm.” Sarah Brown, wife of former British prime minister Gordon Brown is one of the victims. Her 1.1 million followers received a message early Tuesday with a link to a Japanese pornography site.Twitter said they fixed the problem several hours after it was first detected.

Security experts further said that it is a good idea to use a third-party Twitter client like TweetDeck to access the service. User can also use JavaScript blocker, such as the NoScript add-on for Firefox to avoid this sort of problem.