The names and faces behind the ‘onMouseOver’ Twitter worm attack

It’s been over 24 hours now since many Twitter users around the world found that their pages had become infested by messages spreading virally across the network.

The victims

High profile victims of the “onMouseOver” worm included ex-Prime Minister’s wife Sarah Brown, British businessman and host of BBC TV’s “The Apprentice” Lord Alan Sugar, and even Robert Gibbs, the press secretary to US President Barack Obama.

Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users appear to have been hit by the attack – but should we blame them for what happened? I don’t think so. What did they do to deserve it? Not much, I’d argue. Most of them innocently rolled their mouse over a tweet or may have visited a popular Twitter users’ profile infected with a screen practically filled with huge text and near impossible to avoid with a mouse…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.