Tumblr Worm Spreads Rapidly and Posts Obscene GNAA Message on Logged-In User's Blogs

Every so often there comes about an attack on a large social network. In the latest happenings in the online social world, Tumblr was hit with a massive and rapidly spreading worm that has taken advantage of Tumblogs belonging to users logged in at the time of an attack that has left the blogs with an obscene and racists-toned fabricated GNAA (Gay N***** Association of America) message as shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Tumblr worm fabricated obscene message found on attacked Tumblogs

The exploited GNAA message found on thousands of Tumblr blogs is from a group of Internet trolls who delight themselves in posting vulgar and extremely divisive messages. Security experts yesterday, were first on the scene viewing many Tumblr users taking to other social media outlets explaining how it seems that their Tumblr was hacked and to stay away from the nasty links associated with the shrewd message. It was not until later in the day that Tumblr starting addressing the issue making the service unavailable for all of those affected.

Reportedly, the users affected by the Tumblr worm were those who happen to have their computer logged into Tumblr at the time of the attack. Security experts have also relayed the message of the Tumblr worm spreading at a rapid rate, which leads them to believe that it was a worm exploiting cross-site-scripting (XSS) in the attack, one that has been successful in quickly spreading on other social networks in the past.

In a perfect world, defacing thousands of Tumblogs would have been impossible due to defenses put in place by Tumblr, which other social networks utilize in some degree. Security experts have mentioned in recent reports, that the Tumblr worm could have utilized modified JavaScript to slip past built-in defenses to initiate the attack. The end result was thousands of Tumblr users now have a bad taste in their mouth from such a shrewd message exploited on their own Tumblog. Now that the Tumblr worm is under control through Tumblr's engineers, the situation is still being investigated and hopefully initiating measures to keep it from happening again in the near future.

Tumblr is known for being the ideal place to post something that is too long for twitter, but too short for a substantial blog post. Being in the rankings of the top social networks, Tumblr is a viable target for new hacker attacks. The recent Tumblr worm is just one prime example on how computer users should stay abreast of the latest security news as well as doing their part in protecting their computers with antispyware or antivirus software. The best practice for social network users is to always use caution when clicking on links regardless of how enticing or controversial the content is.