Twitter Security Heating Up In July

For Twitter users, the month of living dangerously begins in two weeks. Come July, Israeli security researcher Aviv Raff plans to publish a new Twitter security vulnerability every day, for the duration of the month.

Raff participated in the "Month of Browser Bugs" initiative in July 2006. It was an effort to raise awareness of browser security flaws. Now he wants to shine the spotlight on Twitter with the "Month of Twitter Bugs."

"Each day I will publish a new vulnerability in a third-party Twitter service on the twitpwn.com Web site," Raff explained on his blog. "As those vulnerabilities can be exploited to create a Twitter worm, I'm going to give the third-party service provider and Twitter at least 24 hours heads-up before I publish the vulnerability."

Raff says that while he has more than enough vulnerabilities to publish one every day in July, he nonetheless welcomes submissions.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Raff, in a previous blog post, observed that Twitter's most significant security problem is its API, which can be abused to create worms.

In May, he created proof-of-concept code that exploits a vulnerability in the Web site twitpic.com, which uses the Twitter API.

Twitter has weathered several security problems already this year. In April, a Twitter worm created by a 17-year-old infected at least 190 accounts and generated almost 10,000 spam tweets.

Also in April, a Twitter administrative account was hacked. The hacker who claimed responsibility posted screenshots of several celebrity Twitter accounts accessed through the compromised administrative account.

There have been other incidents too: In March, about 750 Twitter accounts were hacked and used to send spam. And in January, 33 Twitter accounts associated with celebrities were hacked through a brute-force password attack.

In response to the April account hack, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company would conduct an independent security audit of its internal systems and would deploy additional anti-intrusion measures. To date, the company has not provided an update on its security efforts.

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