 Nearly 10,000 Twitter messages, known as "tweets," had to be deleted to contain the potential damage, but no personal or sensitive information was compromised in the attacks. A 17-year-old boy, who has admitted creating the virus that wreak havoc on Twitter over the weekend, is worried about being sued by the social networking site.
The worm, known as "StalkDaily", was created by the 17-year-old Mike Mooney "out of boredom" and is now generating thousands of spam messages containing the word "Mikeyy." The worm emerged on Saturday when Twitter profiles began posting messages which encouraged people to visit StalkDaily.com. The owner of the website, Mikeyy Mooney, told BNO News that he was responsible. "I am aware of the attack and yes I am behind this attack," he said. Mooney said he created the worm to "give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."
Twitter users were infected by simply visiting an infected users Twitter page. Following being infected, users began tweeting about stalkdaily.com with messages such as "Dude, www.StalkDaily.com is awesome. What's the fuss?" Mikeyy described how he carried out the attack: “I am the person who coded the XSS which then acted as a worm when it auto updated a users profile and status, which then infected other users who viewed their profile. 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 to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website.”
Infected users passwords were not compromised by the worm, “since their session was encrypted”, according to Mikeyy.
If you are infected, there is no cause for concern. Simply follow the 5 steps below to remove the worm from your account:
1. Go to www.twitter.com.
2. Log in to the infected account.
3. Go to "Settings" in the menu.
4. Under "Name", remove the text in the field (which has been edited by the worm).
5. Remove the text under "More info URL", which has also been edited by the worm.
When you completed those 5 steps, the worm is no longer active on your profile but you can get easily re-infected. For now, until the problem has been solved, BNO News recommends that you not visit any accusation Twitter profiles.
News sources:
ADJX
BNONEWS
Telegraph.co.uk
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