Twittering Mikeyy worms way into work

Davey Winder
Sunday, 19 April 2009 20:24

Business IT - Technology

How would you reward the author of not one, but two, worms which are released onto a hugely popular social networking site? The obvious answer is with a job, of course. Doh!

You know, it is bad enough that those of us who use Twitter have had to put up with the nonsense of the StalkDaily and Mikeyy worms from last weekend.

Not to mention the new version of the Mikeyy worm (although probably not written by the original author) using cross-site scripting exploits which has emerged following the publicity surrounding the arrival of chat show queen Oprah on Twitter and the Ashton Kutcher million during the week.

As was reported at the time the Mikeyy behind the worms appears to be a 17 year old called Mikeyy Mooney who says he wrote the worms so as to "give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."

Now you might think that releasing two worms into the wild on a popular system such as Twitter, instead of reporting any vulnerabilities to the site owners so they could take action to protect their members, would only result in bad publicity for the worm author.

You might think that the police would be investigating, and that legal action would be in the pipeline. You might think that these irresponsible actions of a 17 year old would flag them as pretty much unemployable by the IT industry, at least until the fuss had blown over.

Of course, in this strange world that we live in such actions sadly seem to attract the publicity seeking employer, and that appears to be exactly what has happened in the Mikeyy case. My security industry insider friend Graham Cluley over at Sophos says that Mikeyy has accepted a position with a web application development company as a direct result of the publicity surrounding the Twitter worm attacks.

"Mikeyy proved two things by unleashing his computer worm" Cluley warns "firstly, that there was an untapped problem with Twitter, and secondly that he had no problem with acting irresponsibly." Irresponsible is a word that some may also use to describe the employer in this case.

It appears that Travis Rowland of exqSoft Solutions has posted messages to Twitter asking that legal action not be taken against Mikeyy such as "hope u guys don't file lawsuit against him, hope u understand Mikeyy did u favor and could have compromised personal information."

Cluley says "Effectively, exqSoft Solutions is encouraging other youngsters to behave irresponsibly.  The last thing the computer users need is a wave of other kids exploiting software and websites in the hope that they might be rewarded with a job offer."