XSS in Tweetdeck (don't view in Tweetdeck...) | Hacker News Reader

XSS in Tweetdeck (don't view in Tweetdeck...)

twitter.com

37 pointsmaaarghk24 comments

So apparently this was retweeted by @5SOS, a teen pop band with some 3 million followers, which is why most of the responses are confused teenagers.

For some reason this is hilarious to me. Not the pinnacle of responsible disclosure, but no real harm done.

Obviously their social media agent uses tweetdeck...

The replies to that tweet are beautiful. Sometimes you forget that not everyone in the world can recognize a cross-site scripting vulnerability when they see one!

What's sad is that not even wrong security was in place here. They didn't even try. There was NO XSS prevention.

Apparently it was only activated if you included an emoticon (<3) in your tweet, possibly following the closing script tag.

Any UTF8 char actually 💩

Some services will ignore security entirely at first, because it doesn't directly contribute to getting a viable product to market quickly (obviously, users will use an insecure site or app so long as they don't know how insecure it is). Then when the app becomes viable, they will continue to ignore security because it doesn't directly contribute to growth. Security becomes part of the nebulous "optimization" stage which is pushed somewhere down the road - and at some point the application becomes so complex that security isn't deemed worth the effort or the money.

I'm not saying that's what happened here, and depending on the language and platform you're using, xss can be a difficult problem to solve. But it does seem to be a common trait to disregard security until you have to apologize for it.

I guess the New York Times uses Tweetdeck[1]. I saw this because several people I follow had retweeted it and the Twitter app notifies you if several of your followers do the same thing. It's a useful feature. If Tweetdeck does the same thing it could make this spread really fast.

[1] https://twitter.com/derGeruhn/status/476764918763749376

I wonder if the poster of this "twitter worm" could get in legal trouble for this; it's quite similar to the Samy MySpace worm[1] of a decade ago, where the creator was charged with a felony (they plea bargained out).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

Fortunately, the author appears to be German.

Looks like it might even be starting to loop around? The Guardian have already scurried an article about it [1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/11/twitter-tw...

A lot of people I follow must use Tweetdeck. This has been retweeted on my feed several times in the last few minutes.

Somebody in my office got hit with it, that's how I found out.

Wonder if it's because of the emoji at the end? It's HEAVY BLACK HEART, U+2764, e29da4 in hex.

"The most powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing and engagement."

So powerful, it even supports scripted tweets

39,000 retweets and counting.

Someone's gonna get in trouble for using an eval in tweetdeck...

Tweetdeck seems to be down now.

It is: https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/statuses/476770732987252736 == "We've temporarily taken TweetDeck services down to assess today's earlier security issue. We'll update when services are back up."

Security 101 ?

so fast

Apparently it's fixed already

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/06/11/tweetdeck-users-xss...

Definitely not fixed here. Chrome on Linux, logged out and back in, closed and re-opened tab. Not fixed.

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