Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 12th April 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
**Update**
Twitter has posted an update on went occurred from their perspective. In summary, it appears that they have had to deal with three rounds of malicious attacks, they identified and deleted almost 10,000 tweets in total that could have potentially spread the worm.
It looks like they may be taking legal action, just as MySpace did when a similar worm was unleashed.
No sooner had we posted about a first Twitter worm being resolved, we’ve now discovered via Mashable (and verified ourselves) that a second Twitter worm is alive and spreading on Twitter.
Created by the same 17 year old StalkDaily developer Mikey Mooney, the worm apparently uses the same method of infiltration – one which Twitter had supposedly fixed.
Similarly, this worm infiltrates Twitter profiles and posts status messages such as:
Man, Twitter can’t fix sh*t. Mikeyy owns. 
Dude, Mikeyy is the sh*t!
Twitter should really fix this…
Why?
As we mentioned earlier, Mikeyy appears to be doing this primarily out of boredom. In an email he states:
“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.”
To keep yourself safe, you are advised to:
1.Turn off javascript
2.clean settings
3.reset colors in design (with javascript on)
4.get pword reset
5. Clear Cache
6. Try not to visit Twitter profiles (use a 3rd party app)
Written on 12th April 2009
9 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Last night, Twitter was in a state in panic over a ‘worm’ that had exploited the site. Unlike previous bugs which required you click a link of some sort, users could be affected by simply visiting someone else’s profile.
The ‘worm’, stemmed from an apparently twitter-like called StalkDaily, infecting Twitter profiles and status updates directing people to StalkDaily. Throughout the entire event, the StalkDaily site maintained no involvement – today, we learn that was clearly a lie.
The idiot comes clean.
The 17 year old, Brooklyn based owner of StalkDaily, has admitted responsibility for the Twitter worm. In an email to BNO News, the site behind twitter account BreakingNewsOn, Mooney said:
“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.”
Whilst developing the site he learnt more and more about how Twitter worked, using that knowledge to exploit the service and direct people to his own site.
According to social media blog Mashable (who covered the story wonderfully), Mooney was able to exploit the site by apparently making use of Twitter’s bio section. Inserting a script, creating multiple alternate Twitter profiles and having people visit those specific profiles would spread the worm fast across the network.
Twitter takes action
Twitter did eventually announce they had ‘closed the hole’ to stop the the spread of the various links and status updates. They made clear no passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack. No apparent apology however.
Written on 5th December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A Next Web reader sent me a message tonight. Well, basically a cry for help. He’s confused. Some of his friends have some sort of weird ability to time travel.
They beam themselves to the next day and then write something on his wall. He already checked whether this is just a timezone accident, but this unfortunately wasn’t the case.
Prevent this poor chap from going him mental and assure him it’s just a bug. I’d really appreciate it.
Written on 20th November 2008
4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
This morning my iPhone crashed. Must have been a bug. But what is a ‘Bug’ really? Why do we call programming errors ‘Bugs’?
Apparently we call them bugs because Grace Hopper found the first computer “bug”: a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II on September 9, 1945. These early computers were attracting lost of moths who got stuck between the light-bulbs inside the machines. At times there were so many relays malfunctioning that they had a full time bulb changer working to fix find all the ‘Bugs’ stuck between relays.
Hopper created the first compiler for a computer programming language and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes.
Grace pasted the actual bug in her log, as you can see above, as the “first actual case of bug being found.” The term “bug” had meant a computer error beforehand but it became a popular term after Grace found an actual bug.
Besides being credited with finding he first real computer bug Grace is also known as the first person to say the now famous line:
“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.“
Found in a post titled “The Wonderful World of Early Computing” over at Neatorama.
Written on 10th August 2008
6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week Techcrunch reported about a possible vulnerability in Twitter which made it possible to force other people to start following you. A user named johng77536 tricked Twitter and got more than 7000 followers in one night. The hack was an obvious spam effort with only two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com. The account was swiftly deleted by Twitter and that seemed o be the end of it.
Now it appears that it is also possible to get more than 8000 followers in one day WITHOUT hacking Twitter. A fairly unknown blogger with Twitter username @manatee woke up on Friday morning and found 15619 follower requests waiting in her Twitter account. She accepted them all, and ended up with 8000+ followers within a few minutes. Considering she only had 5 followers the day before, this would count for a very sharp rise to fame.
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is quickly losing followers as people start to find out they have involuntarily started following her. Looking more closely at the blog and Twitter posts it could also simply be the same hacker as before who worked just a little harder on looking like a real person instead of a spammer. There is no author listed at the blog or in the Twitter account and the image of a young and beautiful blond woman could have easily been copied from somewhere.
For now @manatee IS still listed as one of the top 100 most popular people at Twitter, which is bound to attract some new followers. I have contacted Twitter and will add their official reply to this post as soon as I get it.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
