There is no legitimate reason for anything other than \w to be in there... how about a real filter? Twitter has been lazy and generally pathetic in just about every area since they began... talk about getting lucky with a good idea.
63 Employees. 55 Million dollars. And twice they fail to accomplish the trivial.
For a halfway decent coder this could be solved in minutes. This has nothing to do with maintaining a huge website as some users have commented. Stuff like this should probably break less when your website is huge.
This, though, as a 'fix,' is just complete incompetence.
https://post.craigslist.org/manage/1340717167/tkrju#tr231033
That link will allow you to edit that post. You don't even have to be logged in.
I've already alerted them, but let's see how long this lasts.
Actually, I think craigslist probably views this more as a feature than an exploit. Since you don't need an account to post on craigslist, they can't do normal cookie based authentication, so they just give you a secret url for editing your page. Unfortunately, the only thing secret about the url is a 5 character alpha-numeric string, which I suppose would be possible to brute force.
I am completely half serious on this.
For every really trivial vulnerability like this that Twitter can't fix, there must be scores of slightly more subtle vulns that go undisclosed.
Like the author said, I think I'll be off Twitter for a little while too.
