Twitter may be in the news this week for the wave of attacks on it users but the past year has shown repeated cross-site scripting infiltrations on sites such as Facebook, eBay and HSBC, the financial institution. What’s different this time is how much faster the community can respond due to the increased use of services like Twitter and Facebook. It should make all of us pause. We need to respond faster to attacks. News of these incidents spread more efficiently than ever before, perhaps even faster than the worm itself. Twitter did not get hammered once, they were attacked four times by the worm and its variants. That has to have some lasting damage. Here’s a screencast about the Twitter worm; attacks across different social networks in the past year and examples of the Twitter activity that resulted from the attack. Plus, a YouTube video showing the musical side of the bored 17-year-old who wrote the script that attacked Twitter. We thought it was interesting.
The twitter cum Facebook et al diaspora faces so many challenges, but this “Can plugging into online social networks via Twitter or Facebook lead to some kind of computer-aided moral decline en masse?” be for real? Do we really have to create technologies that measure each individual child for their carrying capacity for time spent online and time spent trying to sort out right from wrong under the spell of rapid-fire information? The data says youngsters today face challenges using technology, but can technology or legislation lower the risks?