The author of a worm that hit the micro-blogging site Twitter has reportedly secured a lucrative job offer from a web security and development company.
Michael Mooney, a 17 year-old student from Brooklyn, New York, created a worm that exploited a security flaw in the popular social networking site to promote his own website StalkDaily.
The worm created thousands of automated tweets containing the URL to Mooney’s site and crashing the Twitter server. Since then, Twitter has also had to contend with a number of copy-cat attacks.
Mooney described the release of the malware as a “grey” attack in that it was not developed to steal data or user information
But it has now emerged that Mooney has been offered lucrative positions from two software development firms and, according to ABC, has accepted an offer with web applications developers exqSoft Solutions.
Speaking to ABC News, exqSoft CEO Travis Rowland said: “I contacted him [Mooney] after I saw what he did to Twitter and asked him,” Rowland said, adding that Mooney will be doing security analysis and Web development.
“In my opinion, he could have stored the user information on their profiles but he didn’t,” he added. “He didn’t use it to steal personal information.”
Mooney isn’t the first computer virus author to land a lucrative IT security role. Only last month Owen Thor Walker, a teenager from New Zealand, landed a job as a security consultant for a telecommunications company after helping a crime gang hack into more than one million computers worldwide, reported AP.
