GNAA Worm Strikes Tumblr

On Monday, a worm quickly spread through social blogging site Tumblr, posting offensive messages on many users pages. Tumblr says it has now fixed the problem.

CNNMoney’s Adrian Covert reported, “In yet another incident illustrating that no one is safe from hackers, trolls and script kiddies, Tumblr fell victim to a security exploit Monday morning. The attack sucked in thousands of users — including tech news sites Cnet, the Daily Dot and The Verge — but its bark was louder than its bite. Known collectively as GNAA, the mischief-making culprits found an exploit in the Javascript code that lets Tumblr’s users reblog other users’ posts. The group used the exploit to force its own tirade to automatically repost on the Tumblr blog of anyone who clicked it.”

The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski wrote, “So, what is the GNAA? The acronym stands for the Gay N***** Association of America, an anti-blogging Internet trolling organization. One of the member’s Twitter accounts points to the bronies Tumblr tag as a way to keep track of all the blogs being affected. The latest count is over 8,600 uniques.”

Gawker’s Adrian Chen interviewed a spokesman for the hackers, who said, “We contacted Tumblr about this weeks ago and nothing came of it. This was a serious issue that needed to be fixed. Someone would have done a lot worse than just posting a message over and over if they didn’t fix it right away…”

According to Computerworld’s Joab Jackson, “A Tumblr spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the attack, noting only that ‘Tumblr engineers have resolved the issue.’ The attack affected only a few thousand Tumblr accounts, she said.”