NY Teen Say He Created Twiter Worm

April 12, 2009

A New York teenager has claimed responsibility for a Twitter worm that began spreading over the weekend. The worm posts messages to users' pages without their knowledge. The 17-year-old said he created the worm because he was bored, but didn't expect that it "would spread as far or as fast as it did." Twitter said it fixed the vulnerability exploited by the worm, but variants continued to spread. Twitter has said it is taking steps to halt the spread of the new variants and instances of the worm do seem to be declining. The worm exploits a cross-site scripting vulnerability, leading to speculation that Twitter's first attempt at blocking the malware focused on signature recognition rather than addressing the underlying problem.