Twitter takes TweetDeck down after hacking attack
Twitter says its TweetDeck services are back online after it temporarily shut them down following a hack attack on Wednesday.
We've verified our security fix and have turned TweetDeck services back on for all users. Sorry for any inconvenience.
— TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) June 11, 2014
TweetDeck is a popular application, bought by Twitter in 2011 for $40 million, which helps users manage their Twitter accounts.
Apparently a tweet containing rogue computer code started spreading through Twitter by taking advantage of a security flaw in the TweetDeck application. The Guardian reported that theoretically, such flaws could be used to take over accounts. One rogue tweet noted by Quartz was retweeted more than 36,000 times:
<script class="xss">$('.xss').parents().eq(1).find('a').eq(1).click();$('[data-action=retweet]').click();alert('XSS in Tweetdeck')</script>♥
— *andy (@derGeruhn) June 11, 2014
Twitter initially told TweetDeck users to log out and log back in. When that proved ineffective, it shut down the application's services for all users.
We've temporarily taken TweetDeck services down to assess today's earlier security issue. We'll update when services are back up.
— TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) June 11, 2014
It's not the first time Twitter has been compromised. In 2013, hackers gained access to the Twitter accounts of The Associated Press, sending out a false tweet about an attack at the White House.