Twitter Hacked – Fixes Auto-Follow Bug
How many Twitter followers did you have earlier today? The same as Oprah? As many as Justin Bieber? Are you running neck and neck with Ashton Kutcher and CNN? For a short time Monday morning, the answer was yes – everyone on the site had zero followers.
Twitter on Monday fixed a bug that allowed users to “force” others to follow them and prompted the micro-blogging site to temporarily set all users’ follower and following numbers to zero. Follower numbers have since been restored.
“We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to ‘force’ other users to follow them,” Twitter wrote earlier on its status blog.
While it worked to fix abuses of the bug, Twitter put the number of people users were following – and their number of followers – at zero, prompting some concern from popular celebrities that their accounts had been hacked.
“Hackers i send a warning…u have now pissed off over 2 million teenage girls. They are more dangerous than Navy Seals,” Bieber tweeted.
“Twitter is being hacked by some turkish hacker. haha I have 0 followers,” Kutcher
wrote, before being made aware of the glitch.
Bieber and Kutcher have since had their 2.3 million and 4.8 million respective Twitter followers restored.
Twitter noted that “protected updates did not become public as a result of this bug.”
The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to “follow” them on the site. People who typed “accept” followed by a person’s Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers.
The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them. It could have easily allowed spammers to insert messages into thousands of accounts.
The bug in question reportedly allowed users to type “accept [username]” as a tweet, and that person would be signed up as a follower. Do you want Oprah as a follower? Want to send her a direct message? For a short time, typing “accept Oprah” into the Twitter.com update box did just that. The glitch did not appear to have worked on third-party apps.
