MySpace is the fastest growing website on the web. 35 million users, 4th most viewers on the web, up 150% in 3 months. Last week, 19 yr old Samy became everyone's top “friend” on MySpace. Samy wrote a little software worm. The worm added him as a contact to anyone looking at his profile. As well as anyone who then looked at someone's profile who had looked at his profile. And so forth. Samy exploited  a weakness in MySpace code for a prank.

“When I saw 200 friend requests after the first 8 hours, I was surprised. After 2000 a few hours later, I was worried. Once it hit 200,000 in another few hours, I wasn’t sure what to do but to enjoy whatever freedom I had left, so I went to Chipotle and ordered myself a burrito. I went home and it had hit 1,000,000″ Samy says.

Years ago, Chris Gilbey and I looked at starting an internet security business that would find holes in enterprise website security, and then fix them.

Samy hit the jackpot. He exposed a whole category of networking and social interaction sites as built on a pack of cards.These sites are now a critical part of the web's future.On many sites, people reveal very intimate details of themselves.

More. Many sites are now actively “talking” to other sites. Flickr linked in to Blog A or site B or group of sites or MySpace; this network interacting with, that network or, the other group of blogs, or those websites.

So Samy's funny prank exposes every issue of security and identity that have been around the net for years. The questions set up a huge roadblock to deep deep acceptance of a seamless, unseen web working at soft touch to consumers.

Because it comes down to this every time. Can you trust this website? The answer from MySpace; not right now.

This entry was posted on October 18, 2005 at 4:41 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Main Page by Richard McKinnon No Comments Yet