A Japanese developer named is one of the people claiming that he is repsonsible for the virus that spread on Twitter yesterday exposing a major problem with the service, according to the report:
Pearce Delphin, or @zzap on Twitter, says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a piece of code with an onMouseOver JavaScript function, which caused a pop-up to appear when a user merely moves his mouse cursor over the message. Very soon, the code was modified to do other sorts of things – perform auto retweets, open pornographic websites and generally create havoc on Twitter, which lasted a couple of hours until Twitter admins patched the vulnerability.
“I did it merely to see if it could be done … that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet. At the time of posting the tweet, I had no idea it was going to take off how it did. I just hadn’t even considered it,” Delphin told AFP via email. “I discovered a vulnerability, I didn’t create a self-replicating worm. As far as I know, that isn’t technically illegal…”
Of course there are others who say they were really the cause, but experts say this incident shows how fast a potentially more dangerous bug could spread on the social networking service.
