A Brooklyn teenager has admitted to creating two viruses that have hit the popular micro-blogging site Twitter. Why did he do it? To promote his own website, and of course, because he was "bored".
The "StalkDaily" and "Mikeyy" worms exploited unpatched holes in Twitter and spammed unwanted messages on thousands of user's pages, promoting the teen's web site as well as telling "Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy."
The teen, Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, added: "I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."
Mooney added that his site was quickly growing in popularity "because of the worm."
Twitter, for its part, has closed the hole.
"We've taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this 'worm' to spread," Twitter added in a prepared statment. "No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack."
The teen, Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, added: "I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."
Mooney added that his site was quickly growing in popularity "because of the worm."
Twitter, for its part, has closed the hole.
"We've taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this 'worm' to spread," Twitter added in a prepared statment. "No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack."
