17 year old owns Twitter

Written by SecurityWatch

Monday, 20 April 2009 17:08

Two worms attacked Twitter, the hottest social networking Giant, on Saturday and Sunday. A worm is a self replicating computer program. Self replication makes worms a lot more intelligent and complicated. The worms were both the work of Mikkey Mooney, a 17 year old hacker from brooklyn, new york, who used cross site scripting to carry out these attacks. Igcognizant of the legal repercussions Mikkey went on to accept responsibility and state that this was done to make the developers at twitter realize the importance of security, "give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website" he said calmly. This worm was very similar to the samy worm unleashed on myspace my samy kamkar. And most probably like samy, Mikkey will also face legal action. (Samy Kamkar was not allowed to touch a computer for six months, but was aplauded by the Dev team at MySpace). This attack was the first of its kind where two worms created by the same hacker have attacked a site. The first attack was being contained and hadled when the second attack took place. We would like the readers to know that XSS has been in the OWASP top ten ever since it was discovered. It all goes back to empowering the basics. The best way to develop a secure application is not to retrofit with code changes at the end but to make sure the design is woven around a security framework.

Last Updated on Monday, 20 April 2009 17:11