Twitter suffers second worm attack in a week

From InfoWorld: Twitter has put a stop to a worm that posted obscene messages to victims' Twitter feeds. It's the second worm attack the site has suffered in a week.

Those whose accounts became infected with the worm would see a message posted on their Twitter account that read in part "WTF:" followed by a URL, according to a blog post from Sophos, a security vendor.

If someone clicked on the link, their profile would also be hijacked, reposting the same link and increasing the chance that one of their followers would click on it and spread the worm.

Sophos wrote that the worm used a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) technique in order to post to someone's account. In a CSRF attack, a Web application is tricked into honoring a request from a malicious Web site.

The attack was invisible to those who clicked on the link. "All the user sees if they visit the link is a blank page, but behind the scenes it has sent messages to Twitter to post from your account," wrote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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