After shutting down its system for about an hour due to a security breach, Twitter fixed a bug affecting the TweetDeck application.
On Wednesday, people using the social media dashboard app reported that they were seeing malicious tweets, as well as pop-up messages. They also observed that some of their tweets were automatically retweeted containing suspicious computer codes.
A 19-year old Austrian teen admitted to CNN that he was behind the security breach after discovering the app's security vulnerability. The programmer, codenamed Florian, discovered that "&hearts" could be used to create a "♥" in the HTML coding scheme used by most websites online. Florian said that he was experimenting when he accidentally discovered that the heart symbol created a security flaw in TweetDeck's system. The bug allowed users to create commands by their tweets.
"It wasn't a hack. It was some sort of an accident," Florian shared in a chat with CNN.
Florian notified Twitter of the security breach, but hackers took advantage of the security breach and made things worse. Twitter users flooded his account with hate tweets.
"I don't want any more publicity. Everyone is hating me, because I reported a major security-bug in TweetDeck. Enough said," Florian told USA Today.
That same day, Twitter programmers took a few hours to fix the bug. But a few hours later, they found out that the fix didn't resolve the problem. The social medai site posted a downtime announcement stating, "A security issue that affected TweetDeck this morning has been fixed. Please log out of TweetDeck and log back in to fully apply the fix."
The site was shut down after an hour and reactivated by the afternoon.
Earlier reports claimed that the bug only affected those using Google Chrome, however, there were reports that Internet Explorer 9 users were also exposed to the security flaw.
