The 17-year-old Hacker 'devastated' the Twitter network

Pearce Delphin (@zzap) is believed to be the "bait" for other hackers to attack Twitter and cripple for more than five hours .

In the confession announced on September 22, the 17-year-old Australian young man admitted that although he was not intentional, he became the culprit who triggered the massive attack of other hackers on Twitter, redirecting access of other accounts to Japanese pornographic websites, automatically removing these online messages from the Press Secretary of the US Presidential Office. As a result, the entire Twitter network has become extremely chaotic over the course of 5 hours.

Pearce Delphin, who lives with his parents in Melbourne, said he sent a tweet, which contained JavaScript code capable of creating an auto-opening window (pop-up). ) every time other users hover over that message. Immediately, this joke by Pearce Delphin was exploited by other hackers by modifying the code to lead users to pornographic websites and automatically copy and create other messages whenever people are available. read.

" I just want to test whether a JavaScript code can automatically execute in a message or not, " Delphin said, replying to the AFP news agency email, ' When sending that message, I There is no idea what to use it to attack or exploit it for . '

After this incident, Twitter sent an apology to millions of users who were affected by the "mouseover" vulnerability. Among the victims of the attack were White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and Ms Sarah Brown, wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
"Netcraft" - the network security website has traced the traces of code and discovered its origin is from Delphin's computer. The young man said he had the idea of ​​using the Javascript code after seeing another user use the same code to turn his personal page and his messages with fill colors. like a rainbow.

Although it was unintentional to use this code, Delphin also believed that the code could be used to secretly steal information from other accounts. ' The problem after this shows that it is possible to write a code to steal names and passwords of other accounts with only 140 characters that Twitter allows ,' Delphin said.

Fortunately, no one has been successful as Twitter's prediction so far that it is possible to use the code to steal other people's passwords.

Delphin also said that he was one of the first people in Australia to use Twitter (since 2006) and said that the social network administrator knew about the vulnerability (which he just exploited) from a few. month but could not patch.

This young man only has a few weeks to graduate from high school and is planning to study law at university. Pearce Delphin still has not dared to tell his parents about the "storm" he had just made online.

Twitter - a social network that allows users to send messages with a limit of no more than 140 characters. Currently, Twitter has 145 million registered users and produces about 90 million messages every day.