Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com” - Lemmy.World

Automatic text replacement let users spoof URLs ending in x, like netflix.com [http://netflix.com]. Elon Musk’s clumsy brand shift from Twitter to X caused a potentially big problem this week when the social network started automatically changing “twitter.com [http://twitter.com]” to “x.com [http://x.com]” in links. The automatic text replacement reportedly applied to any URL ending in “twitter.com [http://twitter.com]” even if it wasn’t actually a twitter.com [http://twitter.com] link. The change apparently went live on X’s app for iOS, but not on the web version. It seems to have been a problem for a day or two before the company fixed the automatic text replacement so that it wouldn’t affect non-Twitter.com [http://non-Twitter.com] domains. Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move “a gift to phishers” in an article [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/twitters-clumsy-pivot-to-x-com-is-a-gift-to-phishers/] yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like “netflitwitter.com [http://netflitwitter.com],” which would appear as “netflix.com [http://netflix.com]” in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com [http://netflitwitter.com]. “A search at DomainTools.com [https://www.domaintools.com/] shows at least 60 domain names have been registered over the past two days for domains ending in ‘twitter.com [http://twitter.com],’ although research so far shows the majority of these domains have been registered ‘defensively’ by private individuals to prevent the domains from being purchased by scammers,” Krebs wrote.