Twitter reported today that the company’s micro-blogging site experienced a security flaw early this morning, causing some tweets to change colors and others to automatically retweet without the user’s knowledge. The same flaw caused a pop-up window with text to appear when certain users hovered over a link in the Tweet.
According to Twitter, the security exploit was caused by cross-site scripting, the practice of writing code from an unsecure website into another one. Although Twitter fixed the same issue last month, a recent site update caused it to resurface. Twitter fixed Tuesday’s issues by 9:15 a.m. the same day.
Twitter confirms that the security flaw did not affect its mobile site or mobile applications. According to the company blog post, users will not need to change their passwords because user account information was not affected.