Aussie Teen Takes Credit for Twitter Trouble

Sept. 22, 2010— -- An Australian teenager has become an overnight Internet celebrity for admitting that he was the mastermind behind the "mouseover" attack that led to Tuesday's Twitter mayhem.

Pearce Delphin, 17, from Melbourne, Australia, said he exposed a security flaw on the micro-blogging site that other malicious hackers then exploited to send thousands of users to porn and other potentially unsavory websites.

The teenager, who calls himself "an almost legal teen (XVII), social media whore & politics lover" on his Twitter page, told the Agence-France Press that he tweeted a piece of code that would allow websites to open in pop-up browsers as users moved their mouses over the links.

Delphin said got the idea from a Twitterer who used a similar code to tweet rainbows, and when he tweeted his own code it was just to test it out.

"I did it merely to see if it could be done ... that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet," he told the AFP. "At the time of posting the tweet, I had no idea it was going to take off how it did. I just hadn't even considered it."

According to the Bath, England, security firm Netcraft, which traced the source of the code to Delphin within a few hours of the teenager's post, hackers had unleashed a "massive" worm attack against Twitter users.

By mid-morning, a href="http://status.twitter.com/post/1161435117/xss-attack-identified-and-patched" target="_blank">Twitter announced on its status blog that it had patched the hole. But before the company addressed the flaw, some experts said the attack could have affected hundreds of thousands of Twitter users.

The incident has made Delphin something of an Internet star, and from his Twitter posts, it looks as if he's enjoying the fame.

After Netcraft posted a message about the security flaw and attributed the source of the code to Delphin, Delphin tweeted, "Guise, look at me, I'm Internet faaaamous! http://zzap.eu/39555"

Later, he posted, "I appear to be receiving some media coverage. What a great pleasure it must be, to have a friend as wonderful as me."