Twitter virus attack highlights vulnerabilities

A computer worm created by a 17-year-old high school student has attacked social networking site Twitter, flooding the service with advertisements for another site with a similar purpose and function.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has said that the worm infected several Twitter accounts, sending about 10,000 “tweets” that advertised the student’s own website.

The attacks, which took place through four separate waves, occurred on Saturday night and Monday morning. “We are still reviewing all the details, cleaning up, and we remain alert,” Stone said.

The creator of the worm, a New York City high school student, admitted in an interview with Associated Press that he developed it to promote his “StalkDaily.com” website.

“I really didn’t think it was going to get that much attention, but then I started to see all these stories about it and thought, ‘oh my god’,” Michael Mooney said.

The worm worked by automatically reproducing itself once its own links were opened, and about 10,000 Twitter messages spread across the site.

Mooney, who specifically designed the worm to expose some of Twitter’s vulnerabilities, started to re-think his plan after reading comments from Twitter that detailed plans for legal action.

“If I get hit with a lawsuit, I am going to have major regrets and a big brick on my back. I am backing off now. Twitter ignored its vulnerability (to worms) so I am hoping they can just ignore me now,” he said.

Mooney has since updated his StalkDaily.com site after closing it to deal with massive amounts of new traffic.

The worm hasn’t eased the fears of some analysts who suggest that Twitter is too small an operation to deal with cyber attacks. The site’s system, which allows users to send messages of up to 140 characters, has made it attractive to spammers.

As the site itself is a small operation, (it continues to operate with 30 employees on $US55 million of venture capital funds), it has often malfunctioned and shut down under a barrage of multiple spam messages.

This latest incident may spark a new wave of interest in the site from potential buyers, who would help Stone monetise the site and give it more powerful servers to handle attacks.

Google has reportedly been in talks with the micro-blogging site about a potential buyout.

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