Teen claims ‘credit’ for Twitter worm

A 17-year old student has claimed the credit for a worms which affected Twitter users. Michael Mooney says he hopes his efforts will get him work with a computer security firm.

As we noted yesterday, a worm named StalkDaily spread itself through infecting Twitter accounts and sending bogus messages pointing to the StalkDaily website, which apparently also hosted an infection.

The worm has now appeared in at least four different forms, including one which simply spreads messages with the word ‘Mikeyy’. That’s also a name currently used as the signature on a StalkDaily homepage message. (Given the security threat, we recommend not visiting that page.)

Mooney, a high school senior from Brooklyn, tells CNET he was responsible for the attack. He says he’s been writing worms for around three years and that they aren’t designed to do serious damage. He explains his motivations for the Twitter worm as, “[I] basically did it because I was bored” and, apparently showing a strangely naiive understanding of how a worm works, claims, “I didn’t think it would spread as far or as fast as it did.”

Twitter says it will be “following up on all fronts” and notes that a similar attack on MySpace led to a felony conviction. It reports the worms were responsible around 10,000 bogus messages on the site.

If you suspect you may have been affected by the worm, you should turn off JavaScript in your browser, then delete any messages posted in your name containing the words ‘Mikeyy’ or referencing ‘StalkDaily’. It may be a good idea to change your password as well; it’s probably not strictly necessary (Twitter maintains no account security details were compromised), but certainly doesn’t do any harm.

If you’ve escaped the worm, it’s safest to avoid clicking any links from a tweet including either of these two phrases. If you are going to post links to news stories about the virus, it might be an idea to send the link itself and the explanation in separate tweets to avoid followers worrying your account has been affected.

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