Twitter confirms 'auto-follow' bug

It's been a Monday of social-media security embarrassments: Twitter has confirmed the existence of a bug that can force one user to follow another.

The bug appears to have originally been noticed by a Turkish blog, followed by the blog Webrazzi, which successfully tested it out and forced the Twitter accounts of industry luminaries like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams to follow a dummy profile. The flaw allowed members to add followers to their own accounts, basically, by tweeting "accept" followed by "@" and any given Twitter user name.

Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett told CNET that the bug is "unfortunately" real, and that "we're focused on fixing it now (and) hope to know a lot more about the specifics once that's done."

For more on this story, read Twitter confirms awkward 'auto-follow' bug on CNET News.