confessions of a twitter worm victim

as some of you may know, this past wednesday someone released a self-retweeting worm on twitter that exploited an XSS vulnerability in the popular twitter client tweetdeck. i happen to be a tweetdeck user and i got hit by the worm, not once but twice. since i believe in owning up to my mistakes in order to serve as an example to others, i figured it was important for me to write this post.

this isn't the first time i've had to do this. four years ago it was discovered that there had been a RAT bundled with the software for a USB battery charger sold by the energizer battery company (it had gone undetected by the community for years) and i wrote about my experience then as well.

this was the first time getting hit with something that could spread to others, and spread it did. i know this because i got email notifications from twitter when other people's tweetdeck clients automatically retweeted the tweet that that my client automatically retweeted. that's actually one of the things i think i did right - i have twitter setup to send me notifications for as much of that kind of activity as i possibly can. the result is that i get what is essentially an activity log sent to my email in near real-time and that alerted me to the problem within minutes of it occurring.

that quick notification allowed me to undo the retweet before it propagated from my account again. that limited the extent to which i contributed to the spread of the worm. acting quickly to neutralize the threat in my twitter stream is another thing i believe i did right.

unfortunately i also did a number of things wrong. for example, i knew about the XSS vulnerability before i encountered the worm, i saw excellent preventative advice and even retweeted that, but i failed to follow it exactly. the advice was to sign out of tweetdeck and then de-authorize the app in twitter. what i did instead was close the tweetdeck tab in my browser and de-authorize the app. i took a shortcut because i didn't believe anyone i followed would actually tweet anything malicious. i didn't anticipate that they might do so involuntarily - the possibility of something like the samy worm from years past never occurred to me. and so when news spread that the vulnerability had been fix and that users needed to log out and back in again to apply the fix i re-opened the tab, re-authorized the app (because that was the first prompt i was presented with) and then went hunting for the logout button. that's when i got the email notification that another user had retweeted one of my retweets.

however, i did not see the alert popup that was supposed to indicate the worm had executed. i didn't realize it at the time but that was important because it meant there was more going on than i realized. it meant that the worm had not executed in the client i was sitting in front of. what i had forgotten was that i had another tweetdeck client open on a computer at work and when i re-authorized the app the worm executed on the work computer rather than my home computer. it wasn't until i was on a bus to see an old friend that the significance of what had (and had not) happened clicked and then it wasn't for another several hours before i could get access to that work computer (where the alert popup was still patiently waiting for me) in order to log out and back into tweetdeck again, which i did without de-authorizing the app beforehand so the un-retweeted tweet got re-retweeted.

in short it was a comedy of errors.

what i've taken away from this is a number of things:

1. i am once again humbled by the clear demonstration that i am not perfect. while i certainly knew conceptually that i wasn't perfect, i have had a surprisingly good track record with malware. having my ass handed to me made the appreciation of my imperfection much more visceral.
2. i've gained a better appreciation for the value of de-authorizing apps in twitter. to a certain extent it can seem kind of abstract but what it's actually doing is isolating a vulnerable component from the rest of the network not unlike pulling the network cable out of an infected computer did back when worms that enumerated network shares or sent mass emails were prevalent.
3. i've identified my failure to log out of things (not just tweetdeck but all sorts of sites) as a bad habit. it's pure laziness and it's not even rational laziness because there's almost no effort involved in logging in when you use a password manager. part of the reason i didn't post this sooner is because i wanted to see if breaking this habit was a reasonable expectation or whether saying i was going to improve was just wishful thinking. so far this improvement seems like an entirely reasonable expectation - i've had no problems logging out of things when i don't need the session open any longer.

at the end of the day, improvement is what sets an incident apart from a failure. the only real failure is a failure to learn from your mistakes and do better the next time. i'm not perfect (no one is) but each time i screw up i make sure i get better.

month of 'do as i say'

well today is the first day of july and that means it's also the first day of the month of twitter bugs. like past 'month of X bugs', each day a security vulnerability relating to the subject product/service (in this case twitter) will be disclosed to the public.

why are they disclosing these vulnerabilities to the public? as with any exercise in full disclosure the idea is to force the company(ies) involved to clean up their act and fix the disclosed vulnerability. full disclosure puts the information into the public sphere so that many people are aware of it and something as attention-grabbing as a 'month of X bugs' captures even more mind-share and gets it that much closer to the mainstream.

in theory this is good for the public. in theory the researchers doing the disclosure are doing a good deed because they care about security and the company(ies) they're pantsing are lazy, arrogant boors who don't care about security or the public and who need to be forced into doing the right thing. and supposedly fixing the individual bugs the vulnerability researchers identify is the right thing to do.

but what if the theory is wrong? not all companies are created equal (nor are all vulnerability researchers for that matter). nobody knows what goes on inside a company except the people inside that company. it's possible that a given company may actually be working on a comprehensive upgrade to their security posture that would obviate swaths of bugs including the ones that get identified by outside researchers. but that would have to be delayed and the company's time wasted so that they can chase down these individual bugs one at a time in order to appear to be doing something. such is the consequence of shifting vulnerability notification to the public sphere.

now, i'm not going to be disingenuous and suggest this is what happens all the time or even most of the time, but being in software development i feel confident that it is happening some of the time.

external full disclosure practitioners have no way to know that, however, nor have i seen any indication that they care. despite the warm and fuzzy ideology behind the practice, full disclosure is an application of force. it is an exercise in coercion, an example of using public relations to bend a company to the vulnerability researcher's own will because supposedly the researcher knows better than the company what is best for the company's users.

i'm no more a fan of lazy, arrogant, boorish companies than the next guy, but belligerent 3rd parties leave a bad taste in my mouth too.