Who is derGeruhn, account that 40,000 Tweetdeck users involuntarily retweeted? | Hacker News Reader

Who is derGeruhn, account that 40,000 Tweetdeck users involuntarily retweeted?

washingtonpost.com

I don't understand how the two could even be construed to be related (the DDoS and the Tweetdeck XSS vuln).

Guy sees vuln, decides to exploit it "humorously" (as humorous as a German can get, that is, heh), and now WaPo is writing about how they're apparently not related?

Why would they be related in the first place? Am I missing something? This seems like a report on the fact that it's cloudy today, which is apparently unrelated to the stock market being down. No shit?

The author of the article has no idea what he's reporting on so it's not hard to draw conclusions when in his mind all he sees is "omg two popular internet things got hacked in the same day".

He even calls the obvious XSS attack a piece of 'cryptic code'. This guy is not a tech writer.

> Caitlin Dewey runs The Intersect blog, writing about digital and Internet culture. Before joining the Post, she was an associate online editor at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

She is certainly not a tech writer. She just writes about shit that happens on the Internet. You don't have to be technical to write about culture, even if it is Internet culture.

> His tweets don’t, unfortunately, appear to reveal any link between Perdana and this mysterious string of DDoS attacks. We’ve reached out to Perdana for further explanation on that score, and will update this post if we hear back from him.

Uh...maybe the OP isn't a tech writer, but don't Perdana's tweets, at least the one with the XSS exploit, explicitly reveal a link to the DDoS? If it forces an auto-retweet, then everyone tweeting at once would seem very much like a DDoS

Yea he's most definitely not a tech writer, he refers to the tweet as a "cryptic line of code" when it is very obviously an XSS attack.

No - the DDoS is against a completely unrelated set of sites (Evernote and Feedly) via a completely unrelated mechanism.

This XSS is simple and it isn't like the code isn't in the tweet - all it does is expand the tweet on TweetDeck, click "Retweet", and pop an alert.

I wish writers would at least consult someone who knows how to read code before trying to speculate on stuff like this.

I thought something was wrong with Twitter on Sunday. My desktop Twitter client was automatically favoriting and retweeting everything @pmarca said. He joked and said that's how it's support to work, but I was wondering if it happened to anyone else.

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