X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in users' posts, breaking legit URLs
mashable.com
A scammer's dream and a disaster waiting to happen.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of “Twitter.com” to “X.com” automatically.

If a user typed in “Twitter.com,” they would see “Twitter.com” as they typed it before hitting “Post.” But, after submitting, the platform would show “X.com” in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user’s permission, for everyone viewing the post.

And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in “Twitter.com” to “X.com.”

  • JayTwo [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    8 months ago

    The concern is that scammers can create fake phishy versions of sites that end in “__x.com” as ___twitter.com to trick Twitter users into divulging passwords or other sensitive info. Because to the Twitter user it’ll look like the genuine site that ends with __x.com on the Twitter app but it won’t actually be.

    Some examples of sites already made to prevent scammers from using them are:
    Netflitwitter, Ametwitter, Fedetwitter, and Roblotwitter, dot com, which falsely showed as Netflix, Amex, FedEx, and Roblox, dot com.
    Though I think they (xitter programmers) already manually added exceptions for the examples that trended which stopped that from happening, for those specific examples.