17 year old unleashes worm on Twitter

Microblogging site Twitter was pummeled by a worm over the weekend. Michael Mooney, a 17 year old has since come forward and confessed to BNONews.com that he was responsible. Mooney essentially exploited a cross-site scripting vulnerability to emulate the characteristics of a worm. Viewing affected profiles and statuses will result in users getting "infected," which in turns means that their profiles and statuses are modified without their knowledge in order to infect other users.

What was striking was Mooney's comment over the incident. He was quoted as saying, "I did this out of boredom, to be honest. I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something and give the developers an insight on the problems and while doing so, promote myself or my website."

While I doubt that many 17 year olds have the same level of technical aptitude in order to discover security flaws and craft malicious attack code like Mooney, his action highlights the unending battle to plug all manner of security weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And of course, it does look like it's time to revise the definition of what a computer "worm" is yet again.

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