Twitter Gets Slammed By the StalkDaily XSS Worm 145
CurtMonash writes "Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims' accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers. Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and it was created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. More information can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole."
author found. Now what? (Score:2)
So the StalkDaily fellow admitted to creating the worm. Now what?
Re:author found. Now what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:author found. Now what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:author found. Now what? (Score:5, Funny)
I tried, but they closed down the Microsoft Pub.
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Don't worry, the Linux pub is better. The beer is free, and you can get a copy of the beer's recipe anytime you like!
Re:author found. Now what? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but if you ask for a beer the bartender calls you a N00B and if you ask what beers are available he tells you to RTFMenu.
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Free as in speech, or free as in... beer?
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Well you've clearly had too much of it, so it must be as in beer, innit?
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So the StalkDaily fellow admitted to creating the worm. Now what?
Stalk him. You'll know what to do when the time's right.
Ob. Penny Arcade (Score:2, Funny)
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âoeI 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.â
Every inch of this quotation just makes you want to
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To hire or to jail, that is the question (Score:5, Funny)
A 17 year old is old enough to understand the ramifications of his actions to a reasonable extent. He no doubt understood that releasing a worm like that would be met with an unfavorable reaction. But he did it anyway. In this sense, he is a potential menace to the Internet.
However, he is still in his formative years. His abilities could be nurtured in productive directions and we could have the next Edward Dijkstra in the making.
So do we punish him and turn him to the Dark Side? Or do we show him love and respect and turn him? There is still good in him. I can feel it.
Clearly he should be made to (Score:3, Funny)
Go and manually run anti virus software on every infected PC.
Re:Clearly he should be made to (Score:5, Informative)
Go and manually run anti virus software on every infected PC.
Not that kind of worm. It was purely a scripting attack involving javascript. No one's computers were harmed, only a bunch of twitter accounts. (Which can no doubt be fixed by patching the whole and some good SQL query to fix all the accounts in one go.)
I say GNU too, in the loo (Score:1, Troll)
No one's computers were harmed, only a bunch of twitter accounts.
Were any of these twitter accounts [slashdot.org] affected?
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There are no infected PC's. The only thing 'infected' was people's twitter statuses, and now that the exploit was patched, there is no virus, since the code was executed by the server, not by the individual computer.
This sounds pretty harmless.
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It was XSS; the idea is that an attacker puts his JavaScript code on a page belonging to someone else. When a victim views the page, their client executes the JavaScript.
Now, in this case, we got lucky: this guy didn't try to exploit browser vulns or anything of the sort. What if, though, this thing had come to the attention of, say, a botnet operator? Combined with a browser vulnerability (the sort found at CanSecWest, for example), the botnet operator could easily have gotten several thousand more systems
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Those aren't mutually exclusive. Convict him in juve or even adult court, the damage was minimal so give him a suspended sentence plus probation. As part of his probation require him to continue his education &/or participate in legal work activities. As part of his sentence have him forfeit his domain name as the fruits of a criminal enterprise.
However, remember one thing. This is the age where there are almost unlimited legal, productive outlets for young programmers and computer enthusiasts. Thi
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Excellent analogy jcr.
Re:To hire or to jail, that is the question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who the fuck is Edward Dijkstra?
You mean Edsger W. Dijkstra [wikipedia.org] maybe?
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Who the fuck is Edward Dijkstra? You mean Edsger W. Dijkstra maybe?
One and the same. Dijkstra published a fair bit using the first name "Edward".
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That if dependent on whether he makes any money from selling his seminal fluid.
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Re:To hire or to jail, that is the question (Score:5, Insightful)
I say anything that slows down the spread of those fucking annoying twitter people is a good thing and he should be awarded a medal.
Tweet this, bitch.
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If you don't like the fucking annoying tweets, nobody is forcing you to read them. Just like slashdot.
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No, but essentially every television news station, talk show host, and even fucking sports sideline announcer is forcing me to hear about their new Twitter page and listen to them go on to ask "What is Twitter anyway?" while their colleagues joke that they don't know either.
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Tweet this, bitch."
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In English we have the verb "to twat" which may help you in your efforts to assist someone to "Tweet this, bitch".
Why does FF insist on putting a red line under "twat" - its been in the language for at least 10 years ...
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Sorry, I should probably point out that "twat" is not a past tense of "twit".
Formatively Challenged? (Score:1)
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So do we punish him and turn him to the Dark Side? Or do we show him love and respect and turn him?
Ideally, a little from column A and a little from column B. Naturally he should be punished; as a society we cannot dare tolerate allowing this sort of thing. He didn't do too much damage; Twitter'll have t'spend a few bucks to undo his work, tho'.
If I had my druthers, I'd leave prison time out of his sentence, but make him pay reparations to Twitter and a small fine, shut down his site, put him on probation, and give him a large pile of community service related to programming and/or web design.
Bit obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bit obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Especially when you read the Terms of Service on Mr. Mooney's own StalkDaily website, e.g.:
7. You must not modify, adapt or hack StalkDaily.com or modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with StalkDaily.com.
8 You must not create or submit unwanted email to any StalkDaily members ("Spam").
9. You must not transmit any worms or viruses or any code of a destructive nature.
Talk about having a "Do as I say, not as I do" morality. At least it's refreshing to see that hypocrisy is not restricted to people over 30.
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Actually, we had a meeting where we agreed that ToS's are by nature BS. We didn't invite anyone over 30, so I don't know if you missed the memo or just weren't invited.
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Don't worry. Twitter has millions in the bank, and lawyers to hand. This little shit will be sued into oblivion and be flipping your burgers.
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Hopefully after he gets a very PAINFUL slap on the wrist for computer trespass.
I really would like the feds/cops to nail him, even if he just gets a stern warning of some sort.
He needs arrested and charged. What he did was a crime, and he needs to be taught to back off of people's computers, preferably before he turns into a legal adult and opens himself up to BIG trouble.
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Please do RTFA.
All he did was to exploit a Twitter XSS vulnerability - he didn't touch anything but their servers.
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That's still hacking.
Exploiters who take advantage of loopholes for their own gain should be punished.
Had this student simply reported the incident to twitter, I'd think differently.
Using it to promote his own site proves bad faith.
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...worms or viruses or any code of a destructive nature.
Is it a good worm, or a bad worm [youtube.com]? Only bad worms are destructive
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It's great publicity for his site which is similar in functionality to Twitter. I guess his idea was that users of Twitter would try it out and eventually switch.
Unfortunately the publicity also says 'I'm an unethical douchebag, (who knows what other shit I might pull)' so I imagine the take-up will be in negative numbers, if anything.
Seems like a great way to shoot himself in the foot.
Twitter's @oblique says "Honour thy error as a hidden intention". Good luck to Mr. Mooney in making that one work for him.
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Why should he be held responsible? The XSS is just plaintext code. It has no meaning unless someone executes it.
If TPB can't be held responsible for simply providing links to illegal downloads, surely this kid shouldn't be held responsible for writing up some XML style sheets.
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Why should he be held responsible? The XSS is just plaintext code. It has no meaning unless someone executes it.
Could the same not be argued about malicious/annoying scripting language code, or any interpreted code for that matter?
If TPB can't be held responsible for simply providing links to illegal downloads, surely this kid shouldn't be held responsible for writing up some XML style sheets.
Maybe its just me, but I think that depending on what country you are in the laws for what you are responsible for change quite a bit.
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And binary code is just plain byte sequence.
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Fuckwits... XSS = Cross Site Scripting, not XML Style Sheets.
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Why should he be held responsible? The XSS is just plaintext code. It has no meaning unless someone executes it.
Why should a person be held responsible for stabbing another person? A knife is just a piece of metal. It has no meaning unless someone uses it.
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If TPB can't be held responsible for simply providing links to illegal downloads, surely this kid shouldn't be held responsible for writing up some XML style sheets.
Yet again living up to your nick! ;)
In this case surely the guy would also be those who upload illegal torrents to TPB, so I don't see how your defense applies.
Would you trust StalkDaily? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, would you? The developer admits to infecting people's computers and accounts in order to advertise his services, and doesn't think he did anything wrong. How can anyone trust his services then?
For starters he should be forced to take down StalkDaily. I'm sure Tweeter lawyers are looking into this right now. And for once, I agree with such a move. /not a tweeter user
Re:Would you trust StalkDaily? (Score:4, Insightful)
Two issues with your post:
One, the dev did not infect anyone's computers. He wrote a small program, on the site, that would update the profile of anybody who saw one of the spam comments. For example, you visit a friend's page who has one of these comments (and therefore the code) and your profile is updated with a comment (and the code). The only "infection" was on the site, not the end users. Also, no accounts were hacked. Simply a case of instructing the visitor's browser to slyly update the visitor's status while looking at a different page. TFA states that there were no passwords, usernames, or anything else in the code.
Two, it's twitter.
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Wait, exploiting software loopholes to circumvent authentication requirements and make changes to privileged (albeit pointless tatt) information is not "hacking" anymore? I must have missed that memo.
Two, it's "twatter". :D
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A Malwarebytes scan comes up with three instances of malware. One is the Seneka rootkit (ouch!).
Also according to the code and analysis posted on TFA showed that the script was ran on the client side, i.e. the user's computer, that exploited an XSS exploit on Twitter's website.
I think that satisfies the definition of a Black-Hat Hack & Infecting users' PCs.
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There's basically three choices when you find something exploitable on a computer: Shut up, use it for fun, or use it to do harm.
What about letting the site owners know about the vulnerability? Sometimes you just get ignored and open yourself up to being a suspect if that vulnerability is used, but it is still an option.. since advertising was involved, I count this as malicious rather than 'for fun'. It's like an unholy for-profit union between spam, chain mails and malware..
Yes it's Twitter. But should that matter? (Score:2)
I tend to agree that Twitter is a waste of bandwidth. But that doesn't mean the offense should be taken any less seriously.
To paraphrase:
... and we all know how that ends.
Then they came for the Twitters.
I did not speak out;
I was not a Twitter.
What if this had been inflicted against Slashdot? Everybody would be up in arms about it. You should defend Twitter as you would want others to defend any website which is meaningful to you.
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not a tweeter user
Obviously.
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Seriously, would you? The developer admits to infecting people's computers and accounts in order to advertise his services, and doesn't think he did anything wrong. How can anyone trust his services then?
For starters he should be forced to take down StalkDaily. I'm sure Tweeter lawyers are looking into this right now. And for once, I agree with such a move. /not a tweeter user
Not only that, but by admitting to what he did he makes criminal prosecution easier. Not a very smart thing to do; plus now he will be forever linked to his act for any future employer to see.
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Twitter is similar to Myspace in about the same way as a frog is similar to World of Warcraft.
Yes.
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Twitter is similar to Myspace in about the same way as a frog is similar to World of Warcraft.
they're both stupid?
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All I could think was, "How freaking GAY!" Myspace all over again, right?
I thought myspace was a traditional hangout for emo types - not much gaiety over there! If you want gay frivolity, you need Bebo or Facebook - everyone there is gay!
I saw this. (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the Japanese people I followed suddenly tweeted a couple lines in English about StalkDaily and I was like 'wtf?' At least now I know it wasn't them.
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One of the Japanese people I followed suddenly tweeted a couple lines in English about StalkDaily and I was like 'wtf?' At least now I know it wasn't them.
Heh - and now you also know that you were one of the victims. Kind of like that movie where everyone who watched a video type died. Except without the death. And the water.
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Yes, but I didn't visit the site. :) In fact, I almost removed the user from my list over it.
Brilliant name, btw.
Re:I saw this. (Score:5, Funny)
You have used the verb "tweeted".
Ninjas have been dispatched to your location, to make sure you don't do it again.
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It sounds better than twitted, and twat is right out.
yes, s/he should have said: (Score:1)
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Grammar Nazi Fail
http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=tweet&ia=luna [reference.com]
Admitting to a felony (Score:2)
Sounds Like A Publicity Stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA:
StalkDaily.com is similar in design and features to Twitter. In addition to the features of Twitter, it also allows users to upload videos and photos. Through looking at the code behind Twitter, Mikeyy was able to produce a similar site to Twitter with some additional features. "I used my past knowledge to gain an insight on how Twitter worked and outputted to a user. Although both of the sites are coded in different languages I was able to give my site the same features as Twitter, while coding some of my own."
It sounds to me like the kid was trying to promote his Twitter knockoff site, but for some reason felt the need to do so by poking a stick in Twitter's eye. Makes me think the whole thing was a juvenile cry for attention. I knew a kid like that in high school. He was smart as could be but would do anything, no matter how socially unacceptable, to get attention.
I think the kid needs counseling and guidance and not a jail sentence.
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FTA:
I think the kid needs counseling and guidance and not a jail sentence.
No, he needs counseling, guidance AND a jail sentence. The kid is 17, and you want to just TALK to him about how he FEELS about what he did...what bull$41t! And to all the "putting him jail will make him a hardcore criminal". PLEASE! Lets see some stats on that. Give him 180 days in JAIL (I.E. Not prison), and 5 years with no access to a computer/phone/etc.
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Right. Let's send him to jail and complete his criminal education on the taxpayer's dime. He's obviously not hardcore yet, but we'll get him there. Jail is definitely the best option for a 17 yr. old who wrote a spam script.
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Yes, let's continue taking criminals, claiming they're not just that, and sending them for 'councelling' instead of prison. On tax dollars, of course. Certainly, the 'going easy on criminals' aspect of current society has been going far better than the alternative lately.
I don't know what "going easy on criminals aspect" you are talking about, I have yet to see ANY attempts at real rehabilitation for criminals.
The difference between paying for clinics and rehabilitation and paying for prisons and guards is that at the end, clinics attempt to help you with whatever issues caused you to break the law so you can return to society. Prisons just build more cells because they know you will be coming back in a few years. Some people can't be helped, but believe it or not, most p
Samy is my hero (Score:3, Insightful)
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From Wikipedia:
Samy Kamkar entered a plea agreement, on January 31, 2007, to a felony charge. The action resulted in Kamkar being sentenced to three years probation, 90 days community service and an undisclosed amount of restitution.
It sounds like Mikeyy will get at least that much, and possibly much more; IIRC Samy had claimed that his virus was just supposed to be for his friends, while Mikeyy has already gone on record saying that he did it for commercial gain. That was a daft move, which he will realize as those words are trotted out over and over in his trial.
The XSS FAQ (Score:3, Informative)
So? (Score:1)
The guy is an amoral scumbag; however... (Score:2)
I must admit that part of me smiled when I thought about how this might turn a few people off regarding Twitter. What an absurd waste of time and resources Tweeting is...
<aside>If I ever have to have surgery, and I find out that the surgical team was tweeting during the procedure - I'm going to sue them for negligence. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR JOB DAMMIT!!</aside>
No, okay, he did something awful. Really. Yeah, he did. Any beneficial side effect wasn't by design.
Maybe I'll buy him a beer after he ge
Spell Twitter (Score:4, Funny)
Remember, you can't spell "Twitter" without using the word "twit".
Worm...? (Score:2)
block Twitter? (Score:1)
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For many employers, a virus like StalkDaily is an additional reason to block Twitter [wordpress.com]. -Ben
For many IT professionals, a company that blocks Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any other social media site is not who they would want to work for in the first place.
Such a company does not want their employees to have a balanced life in and out of the work environment. (Sad when a typical usage might be a quick text message to verify after work plans, which is definitely faster and more efficient than multiple phone calls.) With companies attempting to race pay to the bottom in this economy, proficient I
Re:throw the scumbag in jail (Score:5, Informative)
Idiots like him are the reason viruses exist.
Stop right there! You are infringing on a Microsoft technology.
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Thanks for the smile and the laugh!
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You're not ignorant. You're right. In addition, recent Firefox browsers have built-in XSS blocking.
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Yeah right! Every time some vi comes up, people start holding NoScript as a panacea. I use NoScript so I am aware of its advantages. But it's not a cure-all. There are so many sites (twitter in this case) which simply do not work without Javascript being enabled. So most of the NoScript users who use twitter through a browser will have Javascript enabled - by white listing it in NoScript. So, no sorry, NoScript is not a protection against this one.
Yes, NoScript (Score:3, Informative)
You're wrong, NoScript DOES give protection against this attack. The malicious code comes from the mikeyylolz.uuuq.com, which is not in your NoScript whitelist even if you're using twitter.com with scripts allowed.
Please check http://hackademix.net/2009/04/13/mikeyys-stalkdaily-twitter-worm-vs-noscript/ [hackademix.net]
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Any publicity is good publicity. While I don't really care about either site, I hadn't even heard of StalkDaily before this.
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It's hardly good publicity for StalkDaily. Sure, I'll remember it, but only as a place to avoid. Still, he's now made a name for himself for better or worse and gotten his 15 mins of fame. Whether he can turn that into something good is doubtful though.
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Mod parent up (funny) (Score:1, Offtopic)
nt