Teen claims worm that hit Twitter
Monday, April 13, 2009
A worm introduced to Twitter.com this weekend was apparently spread by a teenager from Brooklyn who said he hacked the popular website out of boredom.
Twitter said on its blog yesterday that it had contained the worm after four separate attacks that infected users' pages, similar to the Samy worm that spread across the popular MySpace social-networking site.
The worms post unwanted messages on the pages of infected users on the microblogging website and spread to other users who visit an infected page.
CNET reported yesterday that the teen, 17-year-old Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, said in an interview that he created two worms that infected the site over the weekend out of boredom and to draw attention to Twitter's vulnerability to cyberattacks.
Mooney told the website that he is a high school senior who aspires to a career as a network security analyst and has been building worms for about three years.
Mooney used one worm on Saturday to spread messages about a website called StalkDaily.com, a blogging site similar to Twitter. On Sunday, after Twitter claimed to have put a stop to the worm, another exploit called "Mikeyy" spread across the site, CNET reported.
The Twitter blog said the company is pursuing all avenues to protect the website's security, including possible legal action against the attacker.
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