Two Hackers Kick Off Month Of MySpace Bugs

There's been the Month of Apple Bugs and the Month of Kernel Bugs, and now a social networking behemoth will become the target as two anonymous hackers have designated April as the Month of MySpace Bugs.

Taking a tongue-in-cheek slant on recent Month of Bugs projects, the hackers, who are pictured on the Web site in wigs and in something of an old Charlie's Angels' pose, say on they are joining in on the "whiny, attention-seeking ploys for acceptance."

"The purpose of the exercise is not so much to expose MySpace as a hive of spam and villainy (since everyone knows that already), but to highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular web sites populated by users of various levels of sophistication," they write. "We could have just as easily gone after Google or Yahoo or MSN or ZDNet or whatever. MySpace is just more fun."

MySpace has been hit with security issues, like malware and phishing scams. The teens and 20-somethings using MySpace probably are more interested in amassing large enough groups of virtual "friends" to make their real friends jealous than they are in practicing safe computing.

The anonymous hackers write on their site that MySpace also is interesting to them because it has "a bazillion users and a kajillion dollars involved."Unlike some of the other Month of Bugs projects, they're not even going after just the "real bugs." They're looking for any and all submissions for unpatched bugs that are directly involved with MySpace.

"While heap overflows and format strings and integer wraps are great and everything, we don't intend to have too many 'real' bugs," they write. "Most of what we intend to publish are silly XSS/misleading CSS-style bugs that MySpace users may actually be able to use for a little while, and that involve only MySpace.com stuff. So, browser bugs, Flash bugs, QT bugs, all are fine, even though they're third party. Bugs in MySpace skinning services or whatever is ideal, especially if most users would blame MySpace for the problem."