The Sina Weibo, launched in late 2009, encounted its first virus attack on June 28, 2011.

China's 'Twitter' Sina Weibo hit by virus

新浪微博首次爆发病毒

Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging service, was hit by a hacker attack around 8 p.m. on Tuesday, affecting over 30,000 users, the National Business Daily reported Wednesday.

Many Weibo users received private messages or comments containing malicious links that when clicked would post another malicious link on their microblog automatically. The deception thus became a vicious cycle infecting more and more users.

Users affected by the virus automatically followed a Weibo user named "hellosamy," who is believed to be the maker of the virus. The account had more than 30,000 followers when Sina Weibo finally located and deleted it.

The incident is the first attack on Sina Weibo since its launch at the end of 2009.

The virus was based on a cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability allowing it to insert malicious html code into Web pages. Sina Weibo has been going all out to promote its open platform strategy recently. Experts believe the attacker may have used loopholes in that platform.

By 9:25 p.m., Sina Weibo announced that it had cleared all elements of the virus, adding that users' personal information, including their account passwords, were not compromised. 

6月28日晚间8时许，新浪微博突然出现大范围用户 “中毒”现象，超过3万名用户被感染，每日经济新闻报道。

很多微博用户在其私信或评论中收到恶意链接，他们点击后系统会自动发布一条带有恶意链接的微博，这样一来又造成了进一步的扩散，形成恶性循环。

用户被感染后，还会被强行关注ID为hellosamy的用户，因此此人被认为是病毒的始作俑者。被新浪微博清理时，它一度有超过3万名“粉丝”。

这是新浪微博自2009年底上线以来首次爆发病毒事件。

此次病毒为XSS型，即恶意攻击者在Web网页中插入恶意html代码。由于新浪微博于近期大力推进开放平台战略，因而不少人士怀疑该漏洞与此有关。

新浪微博昨日晚间发布微博称，截至21时25分，微博上的恶意链接数据已经清除完毕，并称用户密码等个人信息不会受到影响。