A flaw in Adobe Flash has left Twitter users’ login credentials wide open for hackers to take a swing at, according to a news report from Reuters.
A senior security analyst by the name of Mike Bailey, who is with Foreground Security in Orlando, Florida, stated that he discovered the problem which exploits a highly publicized vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash platform, commonly used in today"s interactive web sites and applications.
He informed Twitter of the flaw and it should only take a few hours at the most to patch up the vulnerability by changing the site’s code. Adobe informed programmers how to address the flaw, which dates back to 2006, but many web developers have yet to heed the software makers’ warnings.
Bailey said that "as simple as the attack is, I’ve been finding them all over the place."
He concluded that the site could have been vulnerable to an attack for over a year, but that it wasn’t possible to know whether or not hackers had actually exploited the flaw. Bailey is scheduled to discuss his research findings on the vulnerability at the Black Hat DC security conference in Washington, DC which begins February 2nd.
Twitter’s popularity has grown substantially over the past few years; starting out as a micro-blogging service that asked you a simple question – "what are you doing?" It has found use as a form of communicating major events including the 2009 Iranian presidential election and U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.
Even Bill Gates has become a member of the service, with over 300,000 followers at the time of writing. As a result of its increasing popularity, the service has become a massive target for hackers and spammers who are looking to spread malware or operate potential scams.