Twitter was attacked by a worm with 10,000 tweets spreading the infection

Twitter has announced that it was hit with at least three different worm attacks over the weekend. Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of the StalkDaily Twitter-copycat site, has then admitted creating the worms. 

Biz Stone, company co-founder, has informed that the accounts spreading worms on Twitter were created and had started their operation at about 2 a.m. on Saturday. “From 7:30 a.m. until 11 a.m. PST, our security team worked on eliminating the vectors that could identify this worm,” continued he. It has also been announced that only nearly 90 accounts were compromised at that time. Stone highlighted “we identified and deleted almost 10,000 tweets that could have continued to spread the worm.”

The first worm, dubbed "StalkDaily," took advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the Twitter. The worm would infect the accounts of users who viewed at least one of the several malicious accounts allegedly created by Mooney, and then their accounts would send more spam-style messages to entice friends to the just-infected profiles. The messages promoted the StalkDaily site.

The second attack that affected about 100 different accounts, occurred on Saturday as well, and the third, "Mikeyy," began on Sunday. 

Mooney said he had created the worm "Out of boredom.” Moreover, he stated he knew he could be in trouble, “but it's not me that left the vulnerability out in the open," continued he.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure Corp., stated the attacks may not be over. "There's going to be quite a few modified Twitter worms for a day or two," he said. Hypponen suggest not to view profiles, and not to follow links in order to insure protection.