Mayhem for MySpace with Month of Bugs?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 18 March 2007 23:58

Opinion and Analysis

Could a ‘whiny, attention-seeking ploy’ to show how bug-ridden MySpace is actually work to get News Corp to improve MySpace security and deliver the hackers worldwide infamy?

An interesting article over at PC World that’s worth reading for the full story has uncovered the latest threat against MySpace – a couple of anonymous hackers who promise to release information on bugs and security vulnerabilities during every day of April, starting April 1 – and that’s no joke.

Apparently the hackers have given themselves funky (or weird) hacker names, even though they wish anonymity – Mondo Armando and Müstaschio.

According to PC World, who conducted an email interview with the pair, Armando said that “The purpose of the exercise is not so much to expose MySpace as a hive of spam and villainy (since everyone knows that already), but to highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites. We could have just as easily gone after Google or Yahoo or MSN or IDG or whatever. MySpace is just more fun, and is becoming notoriously [obnoxious] about responding to security issues.”

The “Month of Bugs” is a new phenomenon where hackers use their skills in discovering problems, vulnerabilities and release them one day at a time over the course of a month. This not only serves to bring global attention to the problems that popular platforms like Apple, PHP or MySpace face in the modern age, but to bring some fame – or infamy – to themselves, with hacker HD Moore now famous for the kernel, Apple and PHP bugs of the month for the last few months.

Are people sick of the ‘month of bugs’ phenomenon? Well, unless the MySpace bugs turn out to be incredibly non-critical or simply ‘lame’, the popularity of the month of bugs projects is likely to increase, bringing the issue of security ever further into the forefront of everyone’s minds – and that’s no bad thing at all.