17-year behind massive XSS Attack on Twitter
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 Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of StalkDaily.com from Brooklyn, has admitted responsibility:
“I am aware of the attack and yes I am behind this 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.”
I feel, it's not the question of who did it and at what age? But the technology advancements.
And I hope they get hitted really good by the inmates....
It sounds to me like this kid did the Twitter system a favor by highlighting a key vulnerability in their system.
If he hadn't done it, Twitter wouldn't have known about it, and it may have been exploited later by someone really malicious. If a 17 year old can do it, imagine a 57 year old expert trying to take advantage of it to take advantage of the millions of users on Twitter.
It had the potential to be catastrophic, and the price of averting it was this kid advertising his site against the will of a few users, and I think that's an acceptable trade and the kid deserves the publicity he's getting, which I'm sure will bring his website great success.