X fixes URL blunder that could enable convincing social media phishing campaigns Elon Musk's X has apparently fixed an embarrassing issue implemented earlier in the week that royally bungled URLs on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Users started noticing on Monday that X's programmers implemented a rule on its iOS app that auto-changed Twitter.com links that appeared in Xeets to X.com …
Wow! Slumdog Millionaire moment!
I don't need to click the link, cos I know exactly where they are. I used to use their beach for kite traction sports.
In fact I used to be in the top 4 or 5 kite buggy freestylers in Hampshire ........ but only cos there were only 4 or 5 kite buggy freestylers in Hampshire!
If I had a jellybean for every time a popular website had a domain-squatting risk due to an API with a half-ascii'd autoreplace issue creating arbitrary URLs, I would have two jellybeans. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice this week.
https://corporateclash.net/news/article/153
https://sheriffcranky.substack.com/p/datadog-has-a-security-footgun
To the time when badly implemented profanity filters were all the rage on forums up and down the 'Net.
But it is refreshing to see that X is still in the technological lead, taking what was just an annoying but harmless bug, which sometimes gave us a good laugh[1] and converting it into an attack vector.
[1] the clbuttic[2] examples of Sshrewhorpe, Rosebudheroe or Mastburn
[2] I acknowledge the previous use of this one, but who can resist? Plus, failed to come up (oooer missus) with a way to include buttbuttin.
I remember seeing too many unexpected examples of that resulting in people doing their own manual "profanity" filtering in advance, hence things like "knobber spaniel" (though ISTR that one was rather contrived). Which even years later still makes me snigger because I'm childish.
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