Facebook and Twitter is the target of cybercriminals and are surrounded by many controversies about privacy. Fun followed by a quick panic yesterday on Twitter. Due to a bug unveiled by Gizmodo, a user of Turkey, it was enough tweeter “accept” followed by the @ username + to force anyone to follow an account.
Unsurprisingly, these are the celebrities who have been targeted, and many anonymous have paid the luxury to add Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and others among their subscribers. The deception did not last long. And to address the problem, engineers at Twitter have just reset the meter “subscribers” (followers) and “subscriptions” (FOLLOWING). Thousands of members ignoring the problem then panicked, thinking they had lost their hearing.
This bug allowed some users to force other countries to follow their advice without the tweets of another member. Twitter decided to reset the accounts of subscribers for several hours, the time to repair and clean the bug abuse. This “cleaning” was visible between 6:00 p.m. 5:15 p.m. ET.
All these faults should worry users of social networks. They are increasingly popular, and these users often paradoxically little cautious about their use and disclosure of their personal data.