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Over the weekend, At about 2AM on Saturday, four accounts were created that began spreading a worm on Twitter a self-replicating computer program and began to infect Twitter profiles on the social network. The worm was set up to promote a Twitter rival site, showing unwanted messages on infected user accounts.

Michael Mooney, a 17-year-old US student, told the Associated Press he created the worm to promote his site. Mooney, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, said he wanted to expose vulnerabilities in Twitter. He told AP: "I really didn't think it was going to get that much attention, but then I started to see all these stories about it and thought, 'Oh, my God'."

The worm worked by encouraging users to click on a link to the rival Twitter site, called StalkDaily.com. Once the link was clicked, infected users themselves automatically began to send out messages to friends, promoting the site.

According to Twitter, "No personal or sensitive information, such as passwords, was compromised in the attacks" means all the problems stayed on Twitter. Even if you were infected, nothing happened to your computer.

It would have been simple to integrate a web browser exploit into this so that you could have done anything you wanted to the infected computer, including recording all keyboard strokes and capturing credit card details. quite a while ago smiler kind of worm affected popular social site, My space

In a blog posting on Sunday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: "We are still reviewing all the details, cleaning up, and we remain on alert." In all, there were four waves of attacks on Twitter.The website said it had deleted almost 10,000 tweets, or messages, that could have continued to spread the worm.

The root cause for these problems is that social networks are interactions with other people and we inherently trust the messages from people we know in real life or virtually. So when you get a message from someone on Twitter you trust it because in real life fake messages like this rarely happen." Twitter has promised to conduct a "full review of the weekend activities.