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Tweetdeck's XSS bug: Murphy's Law writ large

When we sat down with Patrick Gilmore, CTO of data center services provider Markley Group, at last month’s MIT CIO symposium and asked him what his biggest IT challenge was, we never expected “Murphy’s Law.”

But the answer makes unequivocal sense. In an ideal world, IT managers would be able to adequately plan for every possible negative scenario, but modern systems are simply too complex to do so. And as we detail in this week’s Searchlight, data service providers aren’t Mr. Murphy’s only target.

As you likely heard — or experienced — on the Twittersphere earlier this week, Tweetdeck, Twitter’s account management app, was innocently “hacked” (a “comedy of errors,” as ZDNet’s Larry Seltzer cheekily described the accident) by a 19-year-old who wanted to experiment with the “&hearts” code – uncovering what was apparently a longstanding XSS vulnerability in the platform. For many of us, this snafu was only a minor nuisance, but for CIOs, the takeaway shouldn’t be taken lightly: You can never be too prepared for Mr. Murphy.

Also trending in tech news: World Cup refs go high tech with smartwatches; a Hong Kong venture-capital firm appoints an algorithm to its board; future Google Glass wearers might be able to detect lies; and more.

Get up to speed and sprint over to Searchlight!

< class="wp-caption-text">[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

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