MySpace Worm - The Popular Guy Hack

Posted on May 29, 2008
Filed Under News, Scams, Frauds, Exploits & Vulnerabilities

Have you heard of the famous “popular guy” hack, also known as the Samy Worm? If not, this will be an interesting read

Written by MySpace member Samy, the “popular guy” hack was actually a worm designed to make Samy the most popular guy on MySpace. Whenever someone viewed Samy’s profile, that person automatically made Samy their friend — without their permission. This was interesting enough, but Samy decided to go further. He created a hack where anyone who viewed a profile where Samy was already a friend also automatically made Samy a friend on their profile. So, if ten people viewed Samy’s profile, Samy would have ten new friends. If 10 people viewed the profiles of each of these new friends, Samy would have an additional 100 friends, and so on.

Ten hours after Samy placed the worm code in his profile, he had over 1,000 friends. Thirteen hours later he had almost 9,000 friends. Eighteen hours later he had almost 1,000,000 friends. Samy tried to stop the worm, but it was too late — it had a life of its own.

The exponential increase in Samy’s friends meant that the MySpace servers become overloaded and had to be shut down temporarily while the worm was disabled.

The worm made the news in the mainstream media. T-shirts with “Samy is my hero” were sold online, and Samy became something of a cult hero. Luckily for Samy, MySpace chose not to take legal action.

Samy told Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen (blog.outer-court.com) that he believes badly designed MySpace profiles cause more damage than his work: “It is true that many people go overboard with their HTML layouts, and I believe that such ‘yellow on blue’ page layouts cause much more damage in the long run than my worm did.”

Obviously Samy has a cheeky sense of humor, but it does give you something to think about when designing your profile.

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