New Twitter Worm on the Rise

New Twitter Worm Targets Celebrities

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/new-twitter-wor.html

Teen Twitter worm writer gets job, spreads new worm

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10222373-83.html

Just when we thought we were safe….

 

You log onto twitter and click on a post mentioning the name of celebrity Ashton Kutcher, unknowingly infecting your own account and sending unauthorized updates to all your contacts. The culprit is a worm that hacks into accounts and instantly sends unauthorized posts with name of celebrities like Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey. Twitter is working as hard as it isolate the worm. The worm spreads by “taking advantage of a common Web programming error, called a cross-scripting vulnerability, on the Twitter Web site…”. It apparently affects accounts accessed through the Internet Explorer browser.

The culprit behind the fifth worm in a series to infect the twitter site is the seventeen yea-old Michael Mooney from Brooklyn, N.Y. who apparently wrote the first four twitter worms because he was “bored and wanted to bring attention to the security holes.” He then caught the attention of Travis Rowland, founder of ExqSoft in Hammond, Oregon, who hired Mooney to create and release the fifth worm. The intent of the duo is not to “aggravate” twitter but simply to expose its vulnerabilities. The teen is now subject to prosecution. Whether or he was hired by the company, the act of hacking was still illegal. Since he is still a minor, the sentencing if he is prosecuted would be directed more towards rehabilitation than punishment, but  Rowland hopes to recruit Mooney into a promising career.

So are social networking sites like twitter and facebook really keeping you safe? The internet is an amazing forum for communication, messaging, information exchange but we can’t forget that it as its limitations. Ultimately we are responsible for what we put on the internet and we will always be subject to things like worms and viruses, especially with young hackers like Mooney trying to expose the security holes in sites like Twitter. Twitter has exploded in popularity and its use has increased drastically – I can’t go a week without hearing mention of the new social messaging site. Perhaps efforts by vigilantes like Mooney will help Twitter increase its security measures.