Vulnerability issue in Periscope, the live streaming service from Twitter, can allow one user to pretend to be another in the chat.
To Periscope was launched in March as a means of broadcasting video from a mobile phone, enabling the user to share it with a group of people and friends of their choice or even with the whole world. The service provides chat functionality that allows participants or those watching the conversation to submit comments on the content.
In a few short tweets on Tuesday, the developers announced that they had identified and fixed the glitch, which could cause several problems for users.
The first tweet, which was distributed to 228,000 Twitter followers of the service, states that "We have just fixed a vulnerability in the chat service that allowed any user to impersonate someone else". While not many details about the vulnerability have been released, the mere fear that anyone can pretend to be someone else in chat is cause for intense concern. Still this user could redirect chatters or viewers to a remote location in order to download and install malware on the victim's computers.
There aren't too many details available on the crack, but just knowing that someone could pose as another user and comment makes the problem a notable one.
Periscope advised via Twitter that currently the available code update will not be complete, and that fake chats will still be available in the Replays feature, which allows video to be played back for a period of 24 hours.
Once the updates for iOS, Android, and the Web service are completed, this problem will no longer exist.
