Earlier today, the blogging platform Tumblr and its massive community of blogs were hacked by an organization known as the GNAA, notorious for their malicious rhetoric as well as their propensity for inundating websites and blogs with inflammatory commentary they deem an affront to their personal beliefs. The issue has since been remedied by Tumblr’s staff, but many were left wondering how the worm responsible for this hack spread and where it came from. It all began with The Daily Dot.
Hacked by the GNAA, The Daily Dot was used as the vector for the worm, spreading it across Tumblr and infecting the system this morning. Tumblr users were shocked to discover a derogatory message placed amongst their post dashboard upon log-in. The hate-fueled and threatening messages warned users that to delete these would result in the complete deletion of their entire Tumblr account.
The GNAA’s specific target was the community of bronies that frequented the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic posts of Tumblr. According to a press release by the GNAA, the group views bronies as “manchildren” and has gone to great lengths to discourage their behavior, such as collecting the IP addresses of nearly 200 users after leaking an infected video of the premier episode of the series’ third season.
As stated earlier, the Tumblr support staff has since discovered the issue and quashed the GNAA’s advancement. One of the site’s developers believes that the group was able to take advantage of a security hole in the video embed field using a “data-uri script tag.” Since the problem’s resolution, Tumblr has assured all users that there is no compromise to passwords and that the hack was merely done to spread their message.
Now that all is well, you can feel free to get back to tumblin’!
(via BuzzFeed, image via Scott Beale)
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