Social-networking services like Facebook and Twitter have a natural defense against hardcore hackers, a security researcher said Tuesday.
The remarkable speed with which several worms spread on Twitter on Tuesday may have sent opportunistic spammers scurrying to exploit a quickly patched vulnerability, but cybercriminals looking for ways to hijack PCs essentially steered clear.
Why?
“Social networks have built-in antibodies…their users,” said Sean Sullivan of the Finnish security company F-Secure. “Compare the Twitter attack to a malicious attack of yesteryear that took weeks or even months to develop. This peaked and ebbed in two and a half hours,” Sullivan said.
That pace was the worms’ undoing. Although they spread voraciously for several hours — the spike of worm-spreading traffic started around 5:30 a.m. Pacific time, according to data from Trendistic.com — Twitter quashed the bug by 7 a.m.
With users tweeting around the clock somewhere in the world, it’s not surprising that the original worm and the inevitable copycats came to the attention of Twitter’s security team. “They make a very dynamic feedback loop for Twitter,” Sullivan said.
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