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Accept Fan Breaks Twitter

All hell broke lose today when a fan of the 80s metal band Accept (sometimes considered the poor man's AC/DC) tweeted "Accept pwnz". A bu...
Accept Fan Breaks Twitter
Written by Chris Crum
  • All hell broke lose today when a fan of the 80s metal band Accept (sometimes considered the poor man’s AC/DC) tweeted "Accept pwnz". A bug in Twitter made user @pwnz his follower.

    So the story goes, and the bug that let people steal followers was born.

    Twitter posted to its status blog:

    We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to "force" other users to follow them. We’re now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place. Follower/following numbers are currently at 0; we’re aware and this too should shortly be resolved.

    Twitter later updated:

    Of note: protected updates did not become public as a result of this bug.

    Lots of abusers were quick to take advantage of the exploit. Mashable’s Adam Ostrow pointed out that Conan O’Brien, who famously only followed a single person, SynBay, had his follower count changed to 14 (it’s back to 1).

    Still, it is somewhat refreshing to find out that such a bug was not discovered through any malicious intent, but just by someone who wanted to share his love for the creators of " Balls to the Wall ".

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