Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, hit by worm

Its popularity dwarfs that of Twitter, but most people have probably never heard of the Sina Weibo micro-blogging site.

Weibo is huge in China, with over 140 million users merrily micro-blogging away, and following the latest updates from their favourite celebrities.

But all this popularity, of course, simply means that there’s an opportunity for more users to be hit by malware should one break out on the system.

Sina Weibo says that a worm broke out on their site at 8.20pm on Tuesday night, Beijing time, exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the site to spread quickly.

According to online reports, the worm originated from a Weibo account called “@hellosamy” and worm forwarded itself to other users with a range of enticing subjects to catch out the unwary.

These ranged from claiming to be links to bloopers from a newly-released propaganda…

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.