NEW YORK — A new way to cause mischief quickly spread through short-messaging service Twitter on Tuesday morning before the site could fix the problem, as mysterious “tweets” of blocked-out text propagated themselves and caused pop-up windows to open.
Shortly before 8 a.m. MDT, Twitter said on its “safety” feed on the site that the attack had been shut down. It also said it does not believe that any user information was compromised. The “vast majority” of the breaches were pranks or promotions.
The hack had been extra-nefarious because the tweets activated without being clicked on — it was enough for Web surfers to move their mouse cursors over them. But it affected only visitors to . Various third-party programs used to send and read postings, such as Tweetdeck and the mobile-phone application Ubertwitter, were unaffected.
Fittingly for Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters, the virus may have been among the shortest on record. Security-software maker F-Secure said the shortest virus so far was 22 characters long. The Associated Press
