Tech & Biz

17-Year-Old Mike Mooney Claims Twitter Worm Credit

by Jordan Yerman | April 12, 2009 at 08:17 am

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A seventeen-year-old kid named Mike Mooney claimed responsibility for the Stalkdaily Worm that struck Twitter yesterday. Twitter developers closed the hole which allowed the exploit, but the postmortem continues.

Apparently, if you were struck, your private data was not captured- only the cookie which allowed authentication to Twitter.

As for the guy claiming responsibility, I dunno... It wouldnt' surprise me for a moment that a teenager could come up with this, but it could just as easily be a kid looking for a bit of sweet-yet-fleeting Internet fame.

Mikeyy explained to BNO News that he created Stalk Daily from “boredom” and because he “needed a way to make money.” He wrote, “I decided if I had site that followed the same functionality and simplicity as one of the most known sites on the web at the time then it would receive a lot of hits. While playing around and getting the site developed I started adding more features and tried to part myself from Twitter, while still giving it's still compact nature and simple use.”

As we’ve seen with worms in the past, this attack was loud and noisy and all the attackers did was collect your Twitter username and cookie. Had they been playing for real, a more profitable approach would have been to leave your profile URL intact and insert some JavaScript that turned your browser into an endpoint on a bot network. </doomandgloom>